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.

Although reports made in May 2010 indicate that Android had outsold Apple iPhones, more recent and current reports of the 2^nd quarter of 2011 made by National Purchase Diary (NPD) on Mobile Phone Track service, which listed the top five selling smartphones in the United States for the months of April-June of 2011, indicate that Apple's iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS outsold other Android phones on the market in the U. S. for the third calendar quarter of 2011. This was true for the previous quarter of the same year; The iPhone 4 held the top spot.  The fact that the iPhone 4 claimed top spot does not come as a surprise to the analysts; rather, it is a testament to them of how well the iPhone is revered among consumers. The iPhone 3GS, which came out in 2009 outsold newer Android phones with higher screen resolutions and more processing power. The list of the five top selling smartphones is depicted below:

1. Apple iPhone 4
2. Apple iPhone 3GS
3. HTC EVO 4G
4. Motorola Droid 3
5. Samsung Intensity II[1]

Apple’s iPhone also outsold Android devices7.8:1 at AT&T’s corporate retail stores in December. A source inside the Apple company told The Mac Observer that those stores sold some 981,000 iPhones between December 1st and December 27^th 2011, and that the Apple device accounted for some 66% of all device sales during that period (see the pie figure below) . Android devices, on the other hand, accounted for just 8.5% of sales during the same period.

According to the report, AT&T sold approximately 981,000 iPhones through AT&T corporate stores in the first 27 days of December, 2011 while 126,000 Android devices were sold during the same period. Even the basic flip and slider phones did better than Android, with 128,000 units sold.[2] However, it is important to understand that this is a report for one particular environment at a particular period in time. As the first iPhone carrier in the world, AT&T has been the dominant iPhone carrier in the U.S. since day one, and AT&T has consistently claimed that the iPhone is its best selling device.

Chart courtesy of Mac Observer: http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/iphone_crushes_android_at_att_corporate_stores_in_december/

A more recent report posted in ismashphone.com, dated January 25 2012, indicated that Apple sold 37 million iPhones in Q4 2011.  It appears that the iPhone 4S really helped take Apple’s handset past competing Android phones. According to research firm Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, Apple’s U.S. smartphone marketshare has doubled to 44.9 percent.[3] Meanwhile, Android marketshare in the U.S. dropped slightly to 44.8 percent. This report means that the iPhone has edged just a little bit past Android in U.S. marketshare. This is occurred after Apple’s Q1 2012 conference call, which saw themselling 37 million handsets. Meanwhile, it’s reported that marketers of Android devices, such as Motorola Mobility, HTC and Sony Ericsson saw drops this quarter.

It’s befuddling when you think about how many ways there are to communicate in 2013. I’d say there are too many new ways to communicate – social media, phone, Skype, instant message, text message, email, it goes on and on. But do any of them outweigh the power of a good old-fashioned face-to-face meeting? Most business executives would argue no. Nothing can replace a face-to-face meeting, at least yet.

That said, face-to-face meetings are without question the most expensive kind, given the travel costs required to make them a reality, and companies around the globe have been trying to make them more financially manageable ever since the recession set in. But recession or no, face-to-face meetings are rarely in the budget cards for small businesses. So how can entrepreneurs around the globe get more out of their virtual meetings while ensuring any physical meeting is worth the cost?

Static variables in Python are created as part of the class declaration.  By contrast, instance variables are created as part of a regular method and not a classmethod or staticmethod.

class A:
  i=3  # static variable
	
  def dosomethingregularmethod(self):
       self.k=4   # instance variable
	
# to access static variables


A.i