in reply to Interview questions

If you get a the chance, you should try to ask them to bring a code sample with them to the interview, or to email it to you a few days before. There are really few things quite as useful as looking at 2-3 pages of code which they've written & asking them questions about it.

You might also want to look into some logic puzzles to ask. I have mixed emotions about asking those types of questions now, but I know that a lot of people swear by them. -- cat

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: Interview questions
by zigster (Hermit) on Jan 22, 2001 at 20:39 UTC
    Code sample is a nice idea, the logic puzzles. Natch dont like those. They test all the wrong things. People are too easily thrown in interviews I try and keep the questions as simple as possible. Logic puzzles and the like are hard, as a few hard questions and the candidate is likely to get flustered and then the interview is blown.
    --

    Zigster
[reply]
      Flustering/stressing out candidates in an interview is not always a bad thing, though. I guess it mostly depends on the job that you're interviewing for. If it's for a sys admin or webmaster or programmer who will have to quickly fix broken production systems, I'd want someone who can think on their feet. I'm not a fan of finding out at a bad moment that someone chokes up & can't hack together code when they're stressed. So there's no point of unnecessarily stressing out every interview candidate, but if it's useful for making a hiring decision, I'm all for asking tough questions that they might not know the answers to & getting them a little stressed out. -- cat
[reply]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom