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Interviewing Programmers

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Hey everyone, i'm currently in the process of starting a new business project, and i need some help interviewing potential programmers. I'm not a programmer by any means, hence why i need to hire someone, but what i'm also discovering is that this makes it a little difficult to assess an interviewees coding ability.

I've read online that the crucial part to interviewing a programmer is to test their coding ability...obviously this makes sense, but what is a guy supposed to do when i can't tell if they've successfully solved the problem or function? For example a supposedly "easy" coding problem would be to ask the candidate to write a function that determines if a string starts with an upper-case letter A-Z. I guess any programmer worth their weight should be able to solve this problem in 30 seconds, or as put in the article "as fast as they can write the answer down", but as i have no coding experience i wouldn't be able to tell if their answer was right or wrong.

So basically i'm wondering if you guys have any suggestions for ways to go about assessing a programmers ability without me actually knowing code??
 
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At my last job, we set up a server in our DMZ and let people VPN in after a few interviews. We asked them to do certain things to test ability. I didn't have the specifics on the tasks as I'm not a programmer, but I do know it was an actual test on a real system using real software development tools. Generally, it was something related in some way to whatever was going on with our developers' current projects. It generally involved a few OS level tasks like moving some files, backing up their work and then whatever development tasks were being tested. I wrote the Unix script that kicked them out after a generous amount of time and recorded their session activity. I do know we looked for things like documentation, versioning, general coding efficiency, etc...

Candidates only got that far if we had already interviewed them a few times and felt they'd get along with everyone, were physically presentable for the work environment, could speak clearly, and were generally knowledgable, employable and even-keeled persons.

Good luck!
 
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I used to do technical questions as part of interviews. Then I wised up and learned it was a LOT more important to understand whether and how well candidates worked with other people, handled pressure, could tell me straight up, "I don't know" (rather than making some crap up) and other general workplace type questions.

For the technical stuff, you can have them talk about past projects they've worked on what roles they fulfilled, specific instances in which they used whatever technology you are interested in and what the biggest impediments to getting work done they had faced, and how they overcame them.

If they can satisfy you with the answers to these questions, it should be enough to convince you they can work to your satisfaction, without resorting to coding tests or other measures of technical ability, which generally don't simulate real world conditions anyway.

Two questions I really got a lot of utility from where "If you were a door, what kind of door would you be, and why?" and "How many gas stations are there in the U.S.".
 
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Thanks for your suggestions XJ-Linux and anynamewilldo! I like the idea of testing the candidate in the same environment they will end up developing in. For my project i am looking to develop a database driven web-application using MYSQL, PHP, and an apache server. Does anyone have ideas of possible problems or situations that i can pose to a possible candidate that will specifically assess their skills with MYSQL and/or PHP?

As i was perusing the internet i came upon Codeinterview, which is a website designed to help conduct the coding section of a programming interview. It allows the programmer to code in their preferred IDE and the interviewer can watch the programmer code in real time. Seems like a pretty cool idea to assess the coding ability of interviewees.

As for non-technical questions i just want to make sure that the interviewee is capable of independent thinking and has the work ethic to get things done without wasting lots of extra time.

Thanks again for your thoughts and i appreciate any further suggestions!
 

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