I am about to employ a new programmer for our ASP.NET MVC projects. I put a lot of weight in an interview as to just how much I like a candidate’s attitude and how I see them working with, talking to and enjoying being part of the team, but on a more practical note I need to weedle out those who talk a good game from those who actually have ability to adapt and overcome programming problems day to day.
Can anyone suggest any good short questions/exercises (preferably in C#) to separate the smart candidates from the good talkers?
UPDATE – Many thanks to all who answered, I have chosen the most voted for in traditional StackOverlfow manner, but still thanks for all the other suggestions.
First things first. Do they even know what MVC. Not just the TLA (three letter acronym) but can they describe it to you. Then what are the benefits. Also it doesn’t hurt to ask them their opinion on it. It is good to know if they even like MVC frameworks.
Next, ask them if they have used any other MVC frameworks. Struts, Spring MVC, Zend or anything like that.
Ask them if they know when a session starts, the general state problem on the net etc etc.
Also a little bit of database. Ask them if they have any experience with database persistence layers.
Then just because you can ask a hard technical question, ask them to write a function that compares two binary trees both in value and structure to see if they are identicial.