When I hire programmers I try to favour ingenuity, knowledge and as best as I can gauge it, work ethic. For instance I might ask them about a theoretical task, possibly something like a scheduler or packet filter etc and give them domain specific data about how it will be used and ask them if there are any optimization they could make if they had this data about the systems use case.
Or I might ask them to describe how an event loop works.. or what the I/O path between their program and the disk looks like in as much detail as they can.
Someone that loves the field is going to have a decent idea about these things even if they never had to build one before.
caveat: these examples are very system level but you can substitute them with appropriate web, financial etc domain specific knowledge.
Or I might ask them to describe how an event loop works.. or what the I/O path between their program and the disk looks like in as much detail as they can.
Someone that loves the field is going to have a decent idea about these things even if they never had to build one before.
caveat: these examples are very system level but you can substitute them with appropriate web, financial etc domain specific knowledge.