Want to hire a programmer? Make sure the job interview includes coding
Today's tip comes from a blog post by Antonio Cangiano, Software Engineer & Technical Evangelist at IBM, who recently interviewed and hired two interns for IBM. One of the things that struck him was that "most students didn't know much about programming in the real world. In particular, they didn't seem to be very up-to-date, most having never heard of things like SVN, GIT, MVC, ORM, Agile programming, or NoSQL."
Resumes, cover letters, and transcripts may make it easy to select the top 50 out of 100 candidates, but if you really want to know someone's ability to code, you've got to give them a coding assignment -- and you've got to carefully review it:
The coding assignment was a huge asset in determining people’s real abilities. Some of the nicest assignments came from those with academically weaker performances. You could clearly see who the hackers and potential future computer science professors were. Without the assignment, the selection process would have been much harder, so I’m glad that it was something we required the applicants to do.
