I interviewed another guy here at Markit. He had a good broad knowledge, but on the coding level he was not so sharp. I asked him about threads and he did not how to answer the question. He had good overall OO knowledge, which I think is important. He could write a simple program, which is good. But I am sure if I grilled him deeper, he would crack. That’s what I have to do. I have to develop some harder questions for people.
One such question is about the different data structures and their algorithms. I could ask people how to do the comparator class.
One other question, which Tom asks and I think it’s a good one is to ask the candidate which data structure you would use if you had to limit the size – not go over a certain size. I still have to find a solution for this. One way would be to use a Queue, or a Stack, but searching is not so easy. Maybe another way is a LinkedHashMap. In either case, it would be interesting to see what the client goes through.
What I liked about the candidate is that he had the concepts correct. He would be a good team lead. Unfortunately, I don’t think they’re going to hire him. I told Vlad he was good, but that he is looking for more of a team lead/mgr position.
Fabian, who crawled on Tue, took a step back yesterday. He could not make any progress crawling. It could be that he was tired. When I was bathing him, he did not really feel like playing.