Need Regex for phone number

[sln]

... How do you
ascertain whether the candidate has basic Perl knowledge, including
whether he or she is actually the one that wrote any code samples you
may have received?

This is not a critique of interview blabla, but one way, if the samples
were the reason you have that person in for an interview, is to pick a
good spot in the sample and actually start the questioning at that point.
Usually the sample will leave some super-duper code impression.
To ignore it alltogether and start with something as simple as parsing
a group of digits, might be demeaning.

Spending time on a candidates submission indicates you are of the
level to understand him, and the candidate will immediatly be at ease.
Then you can hit him with all the junk and crap, helter skelter code
that is really written at (not yours but) most companies.

-sln

 

[Ted Zlatanov]

tn> Was the problem they asked you a toy problem like this phone number
tn> thing, a tricky puzzle, something else?
tn> What did they expect you to do in 30 minutes?

It was trivial data manipulation but honestly I can't remember the exact
task. Maybe a merge sort of CSV data? The inputs were given so it
wasn't a "design" question but a "get this to work" problem. I could
use any language so I used Perl. It took me 5 minutes because I wrote a
test suite and documented everything. I also looked at the last
candidate's Python solution he had not cleaned up and found a bug but
thought it would be unethical to bring that up

Another fun interview question was more recently in 2007, again about
Perl. "How would you set up a hash so when you modify it, the reverse
mapping is available?"

"Well, when I needed this in 2000 I wrote the Tie::Hash::TwoWay CPAN
module so I guess we can look at its source code... That's not
cheating, right?"

Ted