Ruby Certification

[Phil Tomson]

Speaking as someone who has done hiring in a area with lots
of "certification" (Cisco Networking). I can say it means nothing
when I see it on a resume. If I want to know if someone understands
BGP in an interview, I can ask one or two questions and within five
minutes have a pretty good handle on their level of expertise.
I found that there was very little correlation between what I could
discern from someone in person to what was on their resume relative
to "certification".



Sounds like bad hiring practices to me. I think *technical* knowledge
is one of the *easiest* things to figure out in an interview. What I
find really hard to figure out is if the person is going to have a good
attitude, work well with others, be good with customers, and so on.

I would even maintain that a technical interview is not a very good way to
guauge someone's technical expertise and talent. There are very talented
people who lock-up in that situation. And it is an artificial
situation:
In real life how often do you find yourself locked in a room without any
reference books and no internet access?

It would be better to consider a candidate's community involvment
including open source code the candidate has produced. Lacking that, I'd
like to see more 'real-world' technical interviews where the interviewer
brings in a laptop (with wifi access, a compiler or interpretter,
program editors, IDEs, etc), some reference books and outlines a
problem s/he would like to have the interviewee solve. The interiewer
then leaves the room for 2 or 3 (maybe more) hours and checks back later
to see the code written by the interviewee.

Phil

 

[Phil Tomson]

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I've found it very valuable to give interviewees small programming
problems right there in the interview. For example, write a function
that prints all possible permutations of a string, or that translates
a string into Pig Latin, etc. It really can quickly distinguish the
great programmers from the good programmers from the pretenders. I
like to give the interviewee a laptop with the programming language
installed,

This is important. You're doing a good thing. I've had interviews where
they ask me to write some function (usually it's in C) and they want it
done on a whiteboard. As someone who likes to try things out with the
compiler (or irb in the case of Ruby) I find the whiteboard approach very
frustrating. Also, since we code by typing not writing (on a board) I
suspect that very different neural pathways are involved. We do
diagramming on whiteboards, but we actually code using an editor.

I've run into trouble often enough with those whiteboard programmming
questions that I plan to take my own laptop to interviews in the future.

Phil

 

[James Britt]

You can rank your peers on RubyForge, although I realize relatively few
Ruby programmers have accounts there.....just the best ones.

Just a totally unbiased opinion from a guy who also happens to have an
account on RubyForge.

Indeed, I believe Dan's RubyForge user ID number is 1337, is it not?



James


--

http://www.ruby-doc.org - The Ruby Documentation Site
http://www.rubyxml.com - News, Articles, and Listings for Ruby & XML
http://www.rubystuff.com - The Ruby Store for Ruby Stuff
http://www.jamesbritt.com - Playing with Better Toys

 

[James Edward Gray II]

I've found it very valuable to give interviewees small programming
problems right there in the interview.

My most recent interviewer (for a job I landed, using Ruby), asked me
some programming questions. Now that I've been on the job for a bit,
I can tell you they were issues right out of current projects. What
was really interesting is that they were great discussion questions,
so we could get to talking a little about them. Once you get a
programmer talking about their craft, you can listen for what you're
after.

Now that I know the interview a little better and some of the other
responses to his questions I can say that's exactly how it worked.

James Edward Gray II

 

[James Edward Gray II]

That's what Open Source is for. It's not just a hobby, it's a
portfolio.

I so agree. It's a win, win for everybody.

James Edward Gray II

 

[James Britt]

My most recent interviewer (for a job I landed, using Ruby), asked me
some programming questions. Now that I've been on the job for a bit, I
can tell you they were issues right out of current projects.

Which is a slick technique: Ask potential employees to solve your
current code problems.

birds.kill!( stone )





James

--

http://www.ruby-doc.org - The Ruby Documentation Site
http://www.rubyxml.com - News, Articles, and Listings for Ruby & XML
http://www.rubystuff.com - The Ruby Store for Ruby Stuff
http://www.jamesbritt.com - Playing with Better Toys

 

[gwtmp01]

meone's technical expertise and talent. There are very talented
people who lock-up in that situation. And it is an artificial
situation:
In real life how often do you find yourself locked in a room
without any
reference books and no internet access?

You've given a very nice illustration of a problem with the
interviewer not the interviewee. There are some questions that
should be able to be answered without the aid of a reference book.
There are other questions that might require those resources and an
interviewer is free to make them available.

I understand that some folks don't do well in *any* type of interview
situation but that is a completely different ball of wax.

It would be better to consider a candidate's community involvment
including open source code the candidate has produced.

I often ask about this sort of thing in interviews but I also *always*
ask if there is anything about the person that we haven't covered but
would be important in making a hiring decision. This is an open door
for someone to point out open source projects and such.


Gary Wright

 

[Kev Jackson]

That's what Open Source is for. It's not just a hobby, it's a
portfolio.

-mental

Couldn't agree more - since I started contributing to various projects,
my owns skills have improved dramatically, and I can now point to commit
logs in interviews - before I had to hope that web project x by company
y was still running, otherwise my CV had no real backing.

Kev

 

[Jim Weirich]

When the market for Java programmers exploded there were huge numbers
of highly (un)qualified people getting hired to do Java and causing
all sorts of grief to everyone involved. Lots of them had (or claimed
to have) certification.

obie, who believes in learning from history

Reminds me of a passage I saw today in the Peopleware book (paraphrased):

** HIRING A JUGGLER **

Interviewer: Can you juggle?
Juggler: Sure.
I: 3 balls, 4 balls?
J: No problem, even 5 balls.
I: Can you handle knives and bowling balls.
J: No problem. Chain saws too.
I: And do you have a funny patter to go with it.
J: It's hilarious!
I: Great, you're hired.
J: What? You don't want to see me juggle?
I: ??

 

[Lyndon Samson]

Reminds me of a passage I saw today in the Peopleware book (paraphrased):

Reminds me of how java programmers see VB programmers, guess hubris is
cyclical...