Screening

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror annotates Steve Yegge's Five Essential Phone-Screen Questions, orginally posted in 2004. The kernel of Yegge's post is that the phone interview should actually do some screening:

Please understand: what I'm looking for here is a total vacuum in one of these areas. It's OK if they struggle a little and then figure it out. It's OK if they need some minor hints or prompting. I don't mind if they're rusty or slow. What you're looking for is candidates who are utterly clueless, or horribly confused, about the area in question.

Yegge's five questions, or rather categories of questions, are:

• Coding
  
• Object-oriented Programming
  
• Scripting and Regular Expressions
  
• Data Structures
  
• Bits and Bytes
  

Yegge's example coding questions use C++ and Java, and would be appropriate for C# and JavaScript. For our own purposes, I'd be inclined to include some questions that called for HTML and perhaps some SQL.