Job Interview Questions

[dwlerwill]

Hi All

Hope this is the right place to post this but I'm looking for some suggestions.

I work for a large company as a VB programmer and I am moving to another team in the business. My current role is being advertised and as I manager does not know anything about VB they have tasked me to provide 4 questions to asked the people being interviewed.

Now they need 4 questions for the people to answer to basically trip them up if they are not telling the whole truth about there programming skills but they don't want stuff like. What line of code do you use if you want to do XXXX.

I am totally stuck trying to think of some questions to ask.

Can anyone suggest anything?

Cheers all

David Lerwill
"If at first you don't succeed go to the pub"

 

[dyarwood]

Why not just have them sit a technical test? That way the interview will focus on the person and how they may approach a task. Then the test would see if they were up to the standard of programming you needed.

 

[dwlerwill]

Hi dyarwood

I did suggest that but it is company policy not to run any type of test (I know that sounds stupid)

David Lerwill
"If at first you don't succeed go to the pub"

 

[mmorancbt]

I would (and do) create a simple project. Perhaps a three table data structure. Then I ask the person to look it over and explain in psuedo-code how they would get that data to a website for example.

I ask very specifically for them to identify any functions (by name, data in, and data out) that they would create to acheive their objective.

This became a necessity after a placement agency provided me an .asp developer several years ago. He had "2 years" of experience working on a large project.

I sent him on tasks and 6 hours later - after returning from a meeting - he had 10 lines of code - trying to figure out how to return the most basic data element. By contract, I was obgligated to pay the placement agency.

We came to an agreement - I would pay and never use them again or I wouldn't pay and they would have the opportunity to send me someone who hadn't hidden for 2 years in a large project.

They chose to get paid.

You don't have to make it completely complicated and you could certainly simply ask them to explain to you functions and the process of returning such data.

Take a real piece of code already in place, modify a variable or data field name or two, and you are done.

Matthew Moran (career blog and podcast below)
Career Advice with Attitude for the IT Pro

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/pm/career

http://techcareerconsult.blogspot.com

 

[grande]

Give them a piece of code (no comments) and ask them to explain what it does.

-------------------------
Just call me Captain Awesome.

 

[dwlerwill]

Thanks for the suggestions guys, I have taken grande advice and will print off a bit of code to see if they know what it does

Cheers all

David Lerwill
"If at first you don't succeed go to the pub"

 

[Sheco]

Make a project group with two projects...

First project is a standard EXE. It includes a form and a standard module. On the standard module put a DECLARE for the Win32 API, a public function, and a private CONST.

Second project is an ActiveX DLL. It contains a reference to Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects and a class that connects to a database and returns some values.

Ok, now the button on the form on the first project will call the public function on the standard module which uses the CONST in its call to the Win32 API ... the API will get an ADO connection string from somewhere... maybe something simple like an INI file with GetPrivateProfileString?

Ok, now the button has the connection string, it creates an instance of the class module from the other DLL project. It passes the connection string to that other object which uses it to make an ADO connection to some database and return some value.

OK, once you've got it all working (don't forget to put in some error handling) then add some errors to the code... some simple errors like removing the reference to ADO and some typos and type mismatches and that sort of thing.

Ask the applicant to find and fix the errors, and then explain how the thing works.