teaching machines

Employer Questions

December 11, 2013 by . Filed under public.

I’ve got a student graduating and applying for jobs. With one company, he’s in the middle of a three-stage interview. The first stage was conducted over email, and he was asked the following questions:

  1. What software development books do you think are the best? Which ones are on your bookshelf?
  2. What authors or public personas do you think have the best ideas on software development?
  3. What seminars or conferences did you attend last year or do you routinely attend?
  4. Have you contributed to any open source projects?  If so, which ones?  If not, is any code that you wrote on BitHub/CodeProject or a site like it?
  5. Are you on Stack Overflow or any site like it?  What is your username?

I like these. I’d wager that a graduating student that has answers to any of these is a step above most of his peers.