It’s the eternal conundrum of a hiring manager – you have to hire for every single position in the company without any first-hand experience. How to do it? If you can have a trusted programmer sit in on the interview, that’s ideal, of course. But what if you’re hiring your first programmer? Or what if you’re hiring a freelancer? Or what if company policy dictates that you’re the only person allowed to do the interviewing? Well, in that case, you need some helpful advice and your innate bullshit detector. We questioned programmers and hiring managers and compiled a list of dos and don’ts. Here are some things to ask when interviewing programmers:

Past Experience

Ask the programmer about the biggest disaster of his career so far, and how he handled it. Did he come in at midnight to fix the code? Was he unaware of the problem until someone brought it up? Did someone else handle it?  According to our programmer sources, “Anyone worth their salt has caused a major meltdown. If they say they haven’t, they’re lying. Or very, very green.” Pushing a code with bugs in it isn’t necessarily bad. Not handling it well is bad.

As usual, your biggest asset is not knowing the field, it is knowing people. Asking about career disasters can be uncomfortable, but if the interviewee is experienced and honest then she won’t have a problem telling you about it, and you will get an idea of how she handles mishaps. Even if you don’t understand what the disaster was or how it was fixed, you should be able to tell how honest she’s being and how she handles being put on the spot.

Python and Ruby, each with roots going back into the 1990s, are two of the most popular interpreted programming languages today. Ruby is most widely known as the language in which the ubiquitous Ruby on Rails web application framework is written, but it also has legions of fans that use it for things that have nothing to do with the web. Python is a big hit in the numerical and scientific computing communities at the present time, rapidly displacing such longtime stalwarts as R when it comes to these applications. It too, however, is also put to a myriad of other uses, and the two languages probably vie for the title when it comes to how flexible their users find them.

A Matter of Personality...

That isn't to say that there aren't some major, immediately noticeable, differences between the two programming tongues. Ruby is famous for its flexibility and eagerness to please; it is seen by many as a cleaned-up continuation of Perl's "Do What I Mean" philosophy, whereby the interpreter does its best to figure out the meaning of evening non-canonical syntactic constructs. In fact, the language's creator, Yukihiro Matsumoto, chose his brainchild's name in homage to that earlier language's gemstone-inspired moniker.

Python, on the other hand, takes a very different tact. In a famous Python Enhancement Proposal called "The Zen of Python," longtime Pythonista Tim Peters declared it to be preferable that there should only be a single obvious way to do anything. Python enthusiasts and programmers, then, generally prize unanimity of style over syntactic flexibility compared to those who choose Ruby, and this shows in the code they create. Even Python's whitespace-sensitive parsing has a feel of lending clarity through syntactical enforcement that is very much at odds with the much fuzzier style of typical Ruby code.

For example, Python's much-admired list comprehension feature serves as the most obvious way to build up certain kinds of lists according to initial conditions:

a = [x**3 for x in range(10,20)]
b = [y for y in a if y % 2 == 0]

first builds up a list of the cubes of all of the numbers between 10 and 19 (yes, 19), assigning the result to 'a'. A second list of those elements in 'a' which are even is then stored in 'b'. One natural way to do this in Ruby is probably:

a = (10..19).map {|x| x ** 3}
b = a.select {|y| y.even?}

but there are a number of obvious alternatives, such as:

a = (10..19).collect do |x|
x ** 3
end

b = a.find_all do |y|
y % 2 == 0
end

It tends to be a little easier to come up with equally viable, but syntactically distinct, solutions in Ruby compared to Python, even for relatively simple tasks like the above. That is not to say that Ruby is a messy language, either; it is merely that it is somewhat freer and more forgiving than Python is, and many consider Python's relative purity in this regard a real advantage when it comes to writing clear, easily understandable code.

And Somewhat One of Performance

Recently, I asked my friend, Ray, to list those he believes are the top 10 most forward thinkers in the IT industry.  Below is the list he generated. 

Like most smart people, Ray gets his information from institutions such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Huffington Post, Ted Talks ...  Ray is not an IT expert; he is, however, a marketer: the type that has an opinion on everything and is all too willing to share it.  Unfortunately, many of his opinions are based upon the writings/editorials of those attempting to appeal to the reading level of an 8th grader.  I suppose it could be worse.  He could be referencing Yahoo News, where important stories get priority placement such as when the voluptuous Kate Upton holds a computer close to her breasts.

Before you read further, note that missing from this list and not credited are innovators: Bill Joy, Dennis Ritchie, Linus Torvalds, Alan Turing, Edward Howard Armstrong, Peter Andreas Grunberg and Albert Fent, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz/Hermann Grassmann ... You know the type:  the type of individual who burns the midnight oil and rarely, if ever, guffaws over their discoveries or achievements.

The iconic software company that is based in King County Washington has been getting almost universally slammed from it's recent Los Angeles press announcement about its entry into the hardware business with the convertible laptop/tablet known as Surface.

Certainly I can see the point that it is now competing with its hardware vendors/partners. Intel has done a good job in the arena creating 'reference designs' without competing with its partners.

There is another viewpoint which seems to be ignored. The cold facts are Microsoft is a public company. This puts Microsoft in a legal position of doing the most it can to return value to its shareholders. Failure to do so means somebody is going to jail.

Microsoft has a vision, which at the end of the day is, a certain way to get enough people to see enough value to hand over their money, to fulfill their fiduciary duty.