From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2005-11-04T04:02:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Certification

In article <396C5F57-A162-4FE1-BBB7-747B834F489E@neosynapse.net>,
Steven Arnold  <stevena@neosynapse.net> wrote:
>--Apple-Mail-3-260895979
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>Content-Type: text/plain;
>	charset=US-ASCII;
>	delsp=yes;
>	format=flowed
>
>
>On Nov 3, 2005, at 12:22 PM, gregarican wrote:
>
>> Someone who takes collegiate courses and earns a degree in computer
>> programming should be judged based on such qualifications. Someone who
>> hasn't earned a degree in such a field could be judged on sample code
>> from their projects they have contributed to. If the sample code is
>> owned by a former employer then some other self-maintained portfolio
>> could be presented.
>
>I've found it very valuable to give interviewees small programming  
>problems right there in the interview.  For example, write a function  
>that prints all possible permutations of a string, or that translates  
>a string into Pig Latin, etc.  It really can quickly distinguish the  
>great programmers from the good programmers from the pretenders.  I  
>like to give the interviewee a laptop with the programming language  
>installed, 

This is important.  You're doing a good thing.  I've had interviews where 
they ask me to write some function (usually it's in C) and they want it 
done on a whiteboard.  As someone  who likes to try things out with the 
compiler (or irb in the case of Ruby) I find the whiteboard approach very 
frustrating.  Also, since we code by typing not writing (on a board) I 
suspect that very different neural pathways are involved.  We do 
diagramming on whiteboards, but we actually code using an editor.

I've run into trouble often enough with those whiteboard programmming 
questions that I plan to take my own laptop to interviews in the future.

Phil