So, hiring someone - how can i test them?

[Mr.Guvernment]

Our company is hiring someone to fill a PHP/MySQl position.

my knowledge of PHP is not much but i can read scripts and tell you what they do, MySQL i am better with.

We have interviewed several people who claimed to know PHP and/or MySQL, once in the office, i just showed them part of a script and asked what it did... which to me, reading any mysql query - gives you the answer more or less!

These people just sat there with a dumb look on their face, clearly had no idea what the script did.. (something easy like select * from brain where brain is null type crap)

What are some things i can ask, show someone to see if they do know at least the basics of MySQL and PHP, our entire back end is based on these 2 and we need someone to come in, fix items not working and such (our last coder just left for the U.S)

....

[Slovnaft]

http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/11/110906.html

i dont actually have a solution to your problem just thought youd appreciate it.

[Mr.Guvernment]

lol!! certainly do!

[rogard]

Ask for a portfolio or previous web sites they have done.

If the guy is saying they have 2+ years experience with php/mysql and they still dont know :banana::banana::banana::banana: then you need to maybe find a different pool to get your people from.

[rogard]

http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/11/110906.html

i dont actually have a solution to your problem just thought youd appreciate it.

lol that video is genius :clap:

[xaxis]

When I've been contracted in the past for PHP/MYSQL work I've simply told my employer they're under no obligation to pay me unless they find my work satisfactory. So, I guess you could simply assign them a small task that your company needs done in a given amount of time and make your decision based on what they're able to produce? Just a thought.

[nike]

you could tell them to make a quick presentation about themself in around a day or two, maybe a small php page
and decide whether the page is good, and let them do maybe on task which needs to be done and if you think
the work they did was good and you could need that guy/girl let the person work for you.
not that the person works for you and does only bullsh1t, noone wants that in their company (:

[Particle]

I don't know about the prospects you're getting in your office, but when a potential employer tries to give me some huge, drawn-out test to see if my resume is truthful or not, I go look for work somewhere else. If I am representative of the average decent programmer, you may need to shift gears on your hiring strategy. This may sound odd, but it may also help to look for someone who is shy and/or antisocial. Those groups always seem to have the highest percentage of truly good techies. :)

[Marvin_The_Martian]

This may sound odd, but it may also help to look for someone who is shy and/or antisocial. Those groups always seem to have the highest percentage of truly good techies. :)

That cracked me up :ROTF::ROTF:

[Mr.Guvernment]

true, the one person i interviewed who looked good turned out they wanted about $3k a month (which in CR is alot for this type of job), so interview someone next week, a girl actually, who seems to have "some" experience but not over the hill too much kind of thing.

[HuffPCair]

That video is what I would base every interview on.
But if I was looking for someone in all that fun stuff I would def check previous jobs

[BreeSpree]

I got an idea. Instead of you asking them questions like most employers do, have them just go on long tirades on how much they know, and why they should get the job. In other words, if you can carry a good conversation, where he/she appears to know just as much as you, should it matter if he/she can answer some question? A good question could start like this... "What can you tell me right now that you learned in x ammount of years of experienced coding, that makes you the number one pick for the job?" Now if they're bullcrapping, they won't be able to tell you much, now would they? If they can tell you the basics, and then maybe elaborate into things most other coders wouldn't know, you have the right guy.

[Mr.Guvernment]

I got an idea. Instead of you asking them questions like most employers do, have them just go on long tirades on how much they know, and why they should get the job. In other words, if you can carry a good conversation, where he/she appears to know just as much as you, should it matter if he/she can answer some question? A good question could start like this... "What can you tell me right now that you learned in x ammount of


Smart person, and you know what this is EXACTLYT what happened in the one interview, i had ALL these questions lined up based on responses from people from XS and [H] and i didnt ask a single one, it turned out just to be more "casual" conversation about items and in the end, i ended up knowing more about the person, them as a person, what they could do, then any directed question could of answered!!

[bh2k]

Sadly knowing someone as a person doesn't mean they know what they are doing. I've taken programming test ranging from really simple ones (Connect to a database and output some data) to really really hard ones (Prove this proof through mathematical induction) I think you need to establish what level of expertise you need and create some sort of test or otherwise measure of how you want to rate that person. I mean if it's just a website it can't be like back breakingly hard, but you have to consider if any data on that website is even remotely sensitive you're gonna need someone who also knows how stop injection, XSS, column truncation, you know, the whole gauntlet of problems that plague web apps.

[Derk]

Our company is hiring someone to fill a PHP/MySQl position.

my knowledge of PHP is not much but i can read scripts and tell you what they do, MySQL i am better with.

We have interviewed several people who claimed to know PHP and/or MySQL, once in the office, i just showed them part of a script and asked what it did... which to me, reading any mysql query - gives you the answer more or less!

These people just sat there with a dumb look on their face, clearly had no idea what the script did.. (something easy like select * from brain where brain is null type crap)

What are some things i can ask, show someone to see if they do know at least the basics of MySQL and PHP, our entire back end is based on these 2 and we need someone to come in, fix items not working and such (our last coder just left for the U.S)

....
Give them an SQL Injection vunerable piece of PHP and ask them what's wrong with it, if they start screaming ADDSLASHES ADDSLASHES ADDSLASHES then you know they have enough experience. But more seriously, if you have enough time, just give them a computer and let them write a piece of code in notepad (so, without an IDE) for something not too complicated and allow them to use basic resources, such as php.net.

[luie]

I think the best way is to present the interviewee with a coding puzzle. Have them code it and explain their code/method.

[Mr.Guvernment]

seems a method i would prefer, sit them down and ask them to try and do something.. watch them or give them X time to do it....

[luie]

http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/11/110906.html

i dont actually have a solution to your problem just thought youd appreciate it.

:rofl:

[celemine1Gig]

seems a method i would prefer, sit them down and ask them to try and do something.. watch them or give them X time to do it....

Watching them might be a bad idea, because some poeple tend to get nervous to the point that they can't concentrate, under these circumstances. ;) That means they might know it all, but just can't use their knowledge in that situation. Giving them some time alone with a computer without internet connection might be a better idea when doing your tests.

[vengance_01]

Let me ask these questions:

1: What level is this job. Entry level etc...
2: Come up with a few simple tasks they might be doing in there day to day and see what they can do.

Also you have to realize coding is not just a straight a to b thing. Normally there are many ways to handle a task.

[Particle]

This is a tricky task. If you test them for smoothness in conversation, there is a good chance you're testing their conversational skills instead of their knowledge. You may also get someone knowledgeable who doesn't want to disagree with you or otherwise assert strong opinions without knowing where you stand. It is interview suicide for someone to act all strongly opinionated about products or services. If you give them a test and watch them, they may feel nervous.

Anyway, I just want to reiterate that there's a flip side to every test. Many of them I notice because of myself. I'm nice but antisocial, and I have speech problems. I don't do anything while people are watching me, and if I try to I end up acting retarded. As soon as I'm given a task and left alone though, I can usually blow through it in no time with a good solution that saves money. I was lucky enough that my current company took a chance on me and I've been able to prove myself. I do realize, however, that I don't put on an impressive song and dance during an interview. It would be nice if more employers realized that good workers come with many different exteriors. As such, any single kind of test is going to miss some good people.

Only vaguely related:
I had a bad experience once with a programming position interview. The guy was a smug jackass who kept asking lots of technical questions that he himself didn't know the answers to. I say this because he had one of those over-confident smirks on his face with an overall blankness to his look. Even after explaining some of the "tough" situations like deadlocks and such as well as how to avoid them, he sidestepped it all and said "well, let's let the people who are smarter than you and me take care of that". What a jackass. He gave me the position, but I couldn't see myself working for such an over-confident idiot with a loud personality so I rejected it. Heck. I wrote a complete invoicing, customer, and financial software package for a local company by myself when I was 16. I've written complete computer games including rendering engines and have worked on complex AI. I've programmed autonomous robots and multithreading is what I consider a basic part of even simple apps. I wasn't just some random nub, but I could tell that's what he was trying to make me feel like. I've created my own database engines, resource management systems, ciphers, and complex encryptions. I've written my own IRC client and programmable HTTP server. I've invented media player software, video container formats, and compressions. I've worked on other low level stuff most people just build off of too. I don't like to reinvent the wheel, but I do like to become intimately familiar with it by seeing if I can solve the same problems people did twenty years ago with what I know. I think it makes me a better programmer in the long run. Besides that, it's just fun.

I'm not trying to build myself up as some kind of amazing programmer or anything, but I do think it paints a picture of someone who isn't all hot air and a nodding head. Building on that, it would be easy for a prospective employer to miss what I can bring to their business by only seeing the unusual outward properties: Difficult speech formation (Not stuttering or anything, just that sentence structure inside my head doesn't work the same way as normal English. It is more optimized in a way that is useful for programming. People often end up confused by the word order and thought structure.), antisocial/quiet, etc.

[Mr.Guvernment]

Well in the end the person i interviewed basically wasted my time, he knew the pay rate and in the end said they werent interested cause the pay would be too low.

the other guy in our officed ended up hiring the person, the bad part is he claimed the guy can read english fine and understands the basics, yet he looks at me blank when i say hello, but i will say he seems to know his stuff so far and has fixed some problems already!, He has a wife and kid which i like as it means he is more likely to stay with us due to stability and the good pay vs past jobs they have had.

[rob1101]

http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/11/110906.html

i dont actually have a solution to your problem just thought youd appreciate it.

I enjoyed that :rofl: thanks.

[Mr.Guvernment]

for sure that link was worth this post alone :)

the other guy i work with ended up hiring someone, and he has turned out awsome for him!