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March 19, 2007
Tips for TW Dev Applicants: Rock the Keyboard
TW is in a recruiting frenzy at the moment and two of the mandatory steps for all potential developer hires are (1) a code review asking you to implement a solution to a problem in C# or Java and (2) a subsequent technical interview with at least 2 consultants. The principal focus of the technical interview is to examine the solution from the code review and probe deeper into the thought process behind the solution. For this reason, the technical interview is conducted in a room containing a PC with the source of the code review available within an IDE (e.g., Eclipse).
Note: by the time of the technical interview, the code review has already been checked by other people and considered to be of a sufficient standard to continue the recruitment process.
There are many ways to discover information about the quality of the candidate in this part of the process: some obvious, some not so obvious...
The sort of questions asked during the technical interview might include:
- Why did you choose the Strategy pattern for this solution? Would any others have been appropriate?
- What do you think of how you've tested this method?
- Did you consider any alternative solutions to this problem?
- Can you refactor this class to make this dependency injectable?
In many cases, answering these questions mandates the candidate using the keyboard to navigate around and/or change their code review solution to implement suggestions given by their interviewers. For me, a big indicator in determing how experienced a candidate is how effectively they use the keyboard and keyboard shortcuts to modify code. If I'm interviewing someone who says they have 5 years experience as a developer, yet they are still using the Edit menu to cut and paste code, then I know they're either:
- Nowhere near as experienced as they claim to be, or
- Not competent enough to look for and find mechanisms to increase the speed of their typing (e.g., keyboard shortcuts)
Likewise, there is a strong correlation between years spent developing and general typing speed. Someone who is cutting a lot of code is going to have developed fast fingers. Ditto for IDE familiarity: I've interviewed people who have used Eclipse for years yet have no knowledge of the refactoring options available on the context menu. This level of ignorance doesn't make my think they're lying about their experience necessarily, but it certainly casts some doubt over their ability to extract the most power out of their tool set.
The absence of any of these indicators is not necessarily a deal breaker for me in an interview situation, but it does make me probe even deeper with questions to ensure sufficient technical knowledge.
Posted by Andy Marks at 08:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack