|
I think it's very difficult to discover if someone is trustworthy or not from a simple interview or two.
However, to discover if they can code, in my experience, asking a basic coding question filters out 95% of the riff-raff... For example, on the last mud I worked with, literally only 2 out of 15 applicants knew the correct answer to the following VERY basic debugging question:
Why does this cause a crash?
char string[4];
strcpy(string, "1234");
Another good one is asking the applicants how to get a crash dump from GDB, given a core file. Only -one- of the 15 applicants got this, and knowing how to use your system's debugger is such a critical skill for a mud developer.
The same one was also the only one who knew the command line syntax to compile a c file. I kid you not.
I should mention that all of the applicants could talk a good game, and just chatting with them about design issues, etc wouldn't have turned up their serious deficiencies in programming skill.
Of course, being a programmer myself, it is perhaps easier for me to spot these sorts of deficiencies, but having -any- programming knowledge whatsoever is often enough to seperate the wheat from the chaff.
Saren
|