Blogging Roller

If you read the Java blogs, you've probably seen Bill Venners' excellent How to interview a Programmer article by now. If not, check it out. My favorite quote is below:

Scott Meyers: I hate anything that asks me to design on the spot. That's asking to demonstrate a skill rarely required on the job in a high-stress environment, where it is difficult for a candidate to accurately prove their abilities. I think it's fundamentally an unfair thing to request of a candidate.

This one is a close second:

Bruce Eckel: I ask candidates to create an object model of a chicken.

I mean, how can you argue with Scott Meyers and how can you object to a chicken?

Speaking of arguing with Scott Meyers... I worked at one of those phone company research labs back in the 90's and we had enough money to bring in Scott Meyers to teach us all about C++. Scott was explaining how you can overload operators and you can even overload the equals sign, when one student raised his hand. The student explained that there were some situations in telecommunications systems where A was equal to B, but B was not equal to A. Scott immediately objected, of course, but the student went off into some jargon-filled explanation of his particular problem domain. Scott let the student finish and then said, "if you were to overload the equals operator so that A was equal to B, but B was not equal to A, then I would want to kill you." That was the end of the argument.