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python interview quuestions

geremy condra debatem1 at gmail.com
Wed Aug 11 15:51:24 EDT 2010 
On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 6:04 AM, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:
> In article <4c6298c1$0$11101$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com>,
>  Steven D'Aprano <steve at REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au> wrote:
>
>> Sounds ridiculous, but apparently there are vast hordes of people who can
>> barely program "Hello World" applying for programming jobs. One figure
>> bandied about -- how accurately, I don't know -- is 199 out of every 200
>> job applicants for programming jobs are barely capable of writing a line
>> of code.
>
> By the same token, there are lots of people with advanced degrees in
> computer science who can't code their way out of a paper bag.
>
> One advantage of the take-home test is that you can prepare the test
> once and amortize the preparation cost over many applicants.  It's a big
> investment of time to interview somebody.  By the time I get up to
> investing an hour or so of my time on a phone screen, I'd like to weed
> out the obvious rejects as cheaply as possible.
>
> Even more interesting is to publish some problems on your web site and
> instruct applicants to submit a solution to one of them along with their
> resume.  This makes the per-applicant cost to administer the exam
> essentially zero.  It also has the nice side-effect of weeding out the
> resume spammers.  To be honest, I've never done this, but I've seen
> companies that do.  I may try it sometime.

I can't recall who it was, but I remember being very impressed by a
company that did a variant of this a few years ago: they put
programming problems on the sides of pay phones, taxis, etc. with a
note that said 'If you can solve this, call us'. I have zero doubt
that they got some top talent that way.

Geremy Condra
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