If you really want to weed out the inappropriate candidates, ask a range of basic questions to gauge their range of knowledge. From the more old school questions ‘how is a string stored in memory’, ‘what is a pointer’, to much more new school questions ‘what is a pattern’, ‘what are your thoughts on using 3rd party extensions vs coding solutions in house’, ‘when should you unit test’. Nobody will have perfect answers for all questions, but understanding where the candidate has focused their knowledge development will help you gauge how much to expect from the candidate. A truly passionate developer will A) Know of, or have some experience with the answer or B) Have the balls to say ‘I don’t know the specifics, but I’d really like to find out… can we discuss it for a moment?’.

They only take a few minutes to ask, and if someone can answer some of these questions with honest thought and understanding, you’re way beyond the ‘write some code you code-monkeying code monkey’. No screwing around with net meetings and code review and all that bs.

You want intelligent and relevant candidates? Ask intelligent and relevant questions.

Just sayin’…

(why waste time coding an algorithm (or cpu time executing it) to calculate a value that is already known?)

It was an interesting challenge.

public class Course
{
public int room;
public string name;
public Course(int room, string name)
{
this.room = room;
this.name = name;
}
}
public interface Role
{
string Name { get; }
}
public class StudentRole : Role
{
public string Name {
get { return “Student”; }
}
}
public class LecturerRole : Role
{
public string Name {
get { return “Lecturer”; }
}
}
public class JanitorRole : Role
{
public string Name {
get { return “Janitor”; }
}
}

public class CourseAttending
{
Course course;
Role[] roles;
public CourseAttending(Course course, Role[] roles)
{
this.course = course;
this.roles = roles;
}
}
public class Person
{
public string name;
public CourseAttending[] coursesAttending;
public Person(string name)
{
this.name = name;
}
}

public void Main()
{
Person person = new Person(“John”);
Course course = new Course(101, “WWW”);
person.coursesAttending = new CourseAttending[] { new CourseAttending(course, new Role[] {
new StudentRole(),
new LecturerRole()
}) };
}