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.

.NET is a highly popular programming language from Microsoft that continues to rock the IT industry since its inception almost twelve years ago. Simply stated, it is a development framework comprising of multiple modules that helps in creating Web Applications, Windows Applications as well as Mobile Applications. The demand for .NET programmers saw a definite surge in the last decade - thanks to the evolution of the smart phones.

Listed below are some of the recent and prevalent aspects of .Net

ASP .NET - Web API

Microsoft considers Web AP I as the future of ASP .NET. The world of web is heading towards a simpler, lightweight, REST based services. Web API makes it possible with the ASP.NET MVC without the heavy lifting that WCF requires. jQuery could be utilized for displaying results in front end of the page as shown in the example in Microsoft site.

One of the biggest challenges in pursuing a career in software development is to figure out which language you want to work. In addition to commonly used software programming languages like C, C++, Java a lot of new programming languages such as Python, Ruby on Rails have surfaced especially because they are used by a lot of consumer based start-ups these days.

With so many front and back end languages, the choice of learning Java is a failsafe decision and mastering Java can ensure that you have a bright future in software programming.

What is Java

Java is a computer programming language that is designed to be platform independent meaning that the language can virtually run on any hardware platform. This platform independence and an object oriented framework make Java the preferred language of development especially for client-server web applications.

Facebook has recently released a collection of C++ software modules that it uses to run the popular website.  With Facebook releasing Folly (the name it designated for the collection), more of the internal programs could become open source since they need different parts of the collection.

Jordan DeLong, a Facebook software engineer, said one concerning holdup to releasing additional work is that any open source project had to cut away from the dependencies on non-released internal collection code.