Thanks for the warning. Should I get into another ‘hiring authority’ situation, I’ll be sure to ask for coding demonstrations on a white board, and more ‘non-standard, hard-to-Google’ technical questions — which will be broad enough to avoid being too obscure, of course. I used to hate those too-obscure questions when I interviewed....lol
you don’t need code (syntax) examples or obscure C# functions- you need to know probem solving ability
I went to an interview and they asked me to write a utility (in pseudo code) for reversing a set of strings- they said I had the worst syntax errors (I desperately need the Visual Studio environment to be in for correct syntax) but I was also the only one who got it right, on the first try, in the shortest time they had ever seen (by half)
If you can solve the problem, THEN it does not matter (as much) how good or bad your software writing skills are, you’ve solved the problem.
I have met syntax gurus who can’t program for nothing... We had one guy who spent a week trying to use fancy XML functions to insert elements and attributes into an XML string- I showed him how to write it in a string.Format() in 5 minutes
there is a formula I like to quote
GOOD DESIGN + BAD PROGRAMMER = GOOD PROGRAM
BAD DESIGN + GREAT PROGRAMMER = BAD PROGRAM
The best way to interview someone is to give him a block of broken code and ask him to fix it (nothing that shouldn’t take 5 minutes for someone who knows what he is doing) AND a white board pseudo-code problem to solve.
Whenever I interview and someone asks me an obscure C# function my standard response is “I never used it, are you using that?” Followed by my own questions I like to keep handy about obscure C# info