So, I just finished interviewing a candidate. His CV states that he has been working professionally for about 6 years or so. The initial interview was pretty well, and the candidate was able to talk well about his past experience. I tend to do a generic “who are you?” section, then give them a couple of questions to solve in front of Visual Studio, an architecture question and then a set of technical questions that test how much the candidate knows.

Mostly, I am looking to get an impression about the candidate, since that is all I usually have a chance to do in the span of the interview. The following is a section from the code exercise that this candidate has completed:

for (int i = 0; i < sortedArrLst.Count; i++)
{
    if (sortedArrLst[i].Contains(escapeSrt[0]))
    {
        if (sortedArrLst[i].IndexOf(escapeSrt[0]) == 0)
        {
            sortedArrLst[i] = sortedArrLst[i].Remove(0, escapeSrt[0].Length+1);
            escapeStrDic.Add(sortedArrLst[i], escapeSrt[0]);
        }
        
    }
    if (sortedArrLst[i].Contains(escapeSrt[1]))
    {
        if (sortedArrLst[i].IndexOf(escapeSrt[1]) == 0)
        {
            sortedArrLst[i] = sortedArrLst[i].Remove(0, escapeSrt[1].Length+1);
            escapeStrDic.Add(sortedArrLst[i], escapeSrt[1]);
        }
    }
}

Thank you, failure to use loops will get your disqualified from working at us.

Then there were the gems such as “mutex is a kind of state machine” and “binary search trees are about recursion” or the “I’ll use perfmon to solve a high CPU usage problem in production”.

Then again, the next candidate after that was quite good. Only 4 – 6 to go now.