On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 6:54 PM, Sam Kington <s...@illuminated.co.uk> wrote: > I'm slightly concerned that the specific questions are susceptible to being > googled. Does anyone have any good examples of non-googlable interview > questions that could be answered (or not) over IRC or a similar medium? The > usual standby, asking people to write code during their interview, obviously > doesn't work when someone can google, cut and paste.
In practice it's probably too hard to copy & paste code content for an interview. Even if it weren't it's easy for you as an employer to ask questions about said code to test understanding. Everything from "explain the syntax of that declaration" to "explain your choice of top level algorithm" to "what other ways could you achieve this small aspect/large aspect/entire thing" plus you can always insist they TDD the solution; that happened to me recently for a ruby gig and so I wrote a nano-test framework since I couldn't remember the APIs of anything outside of rspec :D Going further you can start to ask variations like the same program with different inputs, outputs, performance characteristics (running on VM v. metal), different environments ("your network is really laggy, how would that affect it? How would you mitigate?"), different languages ("what programming languages have you used that might be more suited to this & why? any that would be awful for it?") I've seen a colleague who had a fake question that had an answer online he'd written to catch people searching for the question, so there's that too ;-) Paul