Megan — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 16:48:42 +0000

So, any other ideas for a programming tasks? interviews are tomorrow morning. The students I have are pretty inexperienced - all in their first year of university, some have a little experience outside of that. I need something pretty simple that involves some problem solving...

Megan — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 16:30:01 +0000

Thanks a lot for your help. Abhi - those links are great, I'll look at them on Monday.

I got a chance to see the applicants' resumes on Friday. Two know php and one javascript. It does put them at a bit of an advantage. The problem solving skills is what I"m really tring to get at here.

kaykays — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 10:51:04 +0000

IMHO, thirty minutes seems to be very little time to conduct a programming
test. For screening programmers, I generally favour using a aptitude test
comprising of a number of small questions (say 20 questions in 20 minutes)
of varying degrees of complexity and covering logic, maths, etc. The
questions are not very complex, but by imposing a time constraint, it
requires a fast thinker to do well.

Abhishek Reddy — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 10:42:35 +0000

99 bottles of beer is a good basic problem. There are some more challenging ones published by ITA software that they use in interviews. Also, Project Euler is a good source of problems.

There have been a few good articles and posts linked on programming.reddit.com about interviews. Here are some that I remember:
Interviewing and Hiring programmers
Thirteen Patterns Of Programmer Interviews
the power of code samples in interviewing

pr0gr4mm3r — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 21:35:17 +0000

"Write an operating system. Go."

Ok...for real then. Here are a couple of ideas.

Write a program that prints the lyrics to 99 Bottles of Beer. (Idea taken from this site)
Create a simple program and DB for something simple like holding recipes, book inventory, etc.
Write a program that tests if a supplied string is a palindrome.
Make it fun - a simple game like hangman, guess a computer-generated random number, etc.