I am going to an annual Free software/Open Source convention. This event is very community oriented and the hallway meetings are very informal. Since the company I currently work for is looking for C++ developers (in a Linux environment), I printed on a T-shirt the words “We are recruiting C++ developers” in large letters.
Hopefully someone will come up to me, introduce him/her self and tell me he/she is a C++ developer and is looking for a job.
What should I ask to gauge their C++ knowledge? I need a question that can be answered standing in a crowded hallway and with a pastry in hand.
An example might be:
- Why does a destructor need to be virtual?
Or perhaps some more open question such as:
- What is your least favorite C++ feature?
Clarification:
This question will not replace an interview, it just suppose to give an idea if it will be worthwhile to invite a candidate to an interview.
Moreover, we already have a very capable person working full time on trying to fill these positions. Since for my own selfish reasons I want to attend this conference (it is a fun event), I thought it might be an interesting experiment to try and tap this unusual concentration of geeks. If this experiment is going to work, I also wish to have not just a random list of name, but a list of names with some indication of suitability.
I will report here, the results from this experiment, after the conference.
Conclusion:
The conference is over. Here is what I learned from this little experiment:
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It was fun. In general people got it. Most of the comments I got was that it is a nice idea. It was an easy way of sparking a hallway discussion with interesting people.
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C++ developers are not as introverted as one might suspect. My evidence is far from conclusive, but about half dozen C++ developers approached me.
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I shouldn’t be worried about a particular question. A discussion with a potential candidate in this environment tend to naturally fall into a known pattern, of me describing what we are doing, and thus the natural question to ask the candidate is what he/she as done.
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It is hard to gauge the candidate qualifications in this environment. At the end I handed my calling card to every candidate that I met. Since not all of them are actually available right now, I suspect that it will be easy to sort the people that will actually follow up the lead I handed.
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Perhaps I could have be better organized, but I feel that the informal nature of the conversation, and the fact that I handed a calling card, but didn’t wrote down their details, meshed well with the conference’s ambiance.
To conclude: If you are looking for a candidate, and you suspect you will come across your target audience in an informal event, I recommend spending $15 on printing a simple message on a T-shirt. If nothing else it will get you a laugh.
Meta:
This question was never intended to raise any controversy. It seems however, that recruiting is a contentious subject, every answer here was voted down at least once. Even this question was flagd to be closed by some people. If you feel I wasted your time I am truly sorry.
I’d just ask them about what projects they’ve done in C++. If they have done anything non-trivial, and sound like they know what they are talking about, then they may be worth bringing in for a real interview.
I might ask what other languages they use, and when/how they learned C++. If they’ve been doing C++ for a while, and learned it before learning Java, C#, Python, etc., that’s a good sign.
I don’t think impromptu questions about C++ arcana are very useful in gauging whether someone is smart and gets things done. Save that for the real interview.