Customer Reviews

Conducting the Programmer Job Interview: The IT Manager Guide with Java, J2EE, C, C++, UNIX, PHP and Oracle interview questions! (IT Job Interview series)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I often interview programmer candidates, so I bought this book to calibrate my interviewing style and skills. I am appalled at the advice in the book -- I guess I should hope other firms do interview this way, so they'll gather the programmers I definitely don't want and leave the good ones for me.

Besides the defects other reviews have already mentioned (in this day and age, if you only hire candidates who show up in suit&tie as this book recommends, you'll end up missing many of the best techies!), some parts are positively creepy -- e.g., under "Gleaning Demographics" it claims that, while some questions are illegal, you should still slily ask questions to hiddenly gather that kind of information, since aspects such as whether the candidate has small kids (illegal to ask about that) should "factor strongly into a hiring decisions" -- so, ask what the candidate does to relax, that will dupe them into revealing whether they have a family.

Disgusting, really, and I find myself hoping somebody ends up in lots of trouble for practicing such weaselly duplicity -- meanwhile, all I can recommend to anybody but outright weasels is to carefully avoid this horrible book.

This book is full of uptight opinions and puts the job candidate under the magnifying glass. It is almost impossible to please the author. You have to wear a bussiness suit(only white shirt is acceptable), if you don't, you may be considered disrespectful. Knowing the klingon language may indicate a personality disorder!! Let's get serious.
As for the interview questions some of them are ridiculous. Example: C++ section - How do you end a comment started with '/*'? I don't think a hiring manager can make up his mind after asking such questions.

I give it one star just because I can't give it none.

The advice on interviewing is very general and can be found to the same detail with google. The advice is all useful, but it's not worth the price and the style is a little goofy for what I expected to be a more professional book.

The technical interview questions are atrocious. As others have commented, the "easy" questions are useful (e.g. how do you indicate comments?) and some of the solutions to the "hard" questions are incorrect (e.g. they try to illustrate a common C pointer bug in correctly written code).

The book just lacks content.

Quick review:

Job Hunter: For you I call this 4-star; get this book so you know what to watch out for.

Hiring Manager: Give this book a try, but be sure to give it a critical read and don't take everything you read for gospel; use some common sense.

Full review:

Let's see, this isn't a bad book, nor is it a good book. It's middle of the road. It has some good advice, but it relies on a lot of generalization in helping you (the manager) identify a "good programmer." To her credit the author sometimes will step outside her generalizations to say something like "Appearances can be deceiving" alluding to the old adage of don't judge a book by it's cover, but they she digresses back to something like (not a direct quote here, but you get the idea) "if the candidate doesn't have enough appreciation to dress up for the interview, then what kind of employee will they really be?" This seems to fly smack in the face of the previous statement.

There are several edits that were missed that sometimes interrupts the flow of reading. Some of the sample questions (particularly in the C/C++) section are given low/high difficulty ratings that I would argue about.

Overall, if the above represented the only issues I had with this book then I would have rated it 4 stars. As it is, if you are looking for a job, then I do give it 4-stars in helping you prepare for the tactics that some hiring managers might employee at your expense.

For the targeted audience though, I can only rate this a 3 star effort. The extra star downgrade comes from the short-sighted hiring practices that this book perpetuates. Throughout the text the author routinely warns the reader about legal pitfalls regarding certain questions given their obvious discriminatory factor, but then the author turns around and suggests subtle ways to get the candidate to volunteer such information. These suggestions obviously condone the use of discrimination in the guise of "getting the best employee." The demeanor and suggestions continue to impart that "us vs. them" mentality when it comes to management and employees. The focus here is purely bottom line: get the most skilled employee for the lowest cost that will work the most overtime with complaining period.

This approach breeds a mentality that tends to overlook the benefits of developing a relationship with employees that respects their needs both in and out of the office. Just look at the companies rated "best to work for" and you'll see that there are intelligent people out there that realize there is more to how you hire and treat an employee and the consequences of those actions.

The "get the most skilled employee for the lowest cost that will work the most overtime with complaining" type of hiring that this book preaches will work in the short term, but will do nothing for generating a culture of low turnover, high loyalty, and high productivity for years to come.

This is supposedly a book about hiring top-notch engineers. Instead it's a really great way to scare away talent. Do not use the technical content from this book; if you have to do a technical interview and you're not up on the technology in question, use another resource.

The questions in this book are terrible, ranging from trivial ("How do you end a comment in C"), to mildly wrong (regarding the correct declaration of the main function in C). And then we have the hilariously and incredibly confused:

Q: What would you say someone is doing if they are calling "mmap()" followed by "sizeof()"
A: They are trying to get the size of a file.

Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Make it stop hurting, please.

Q: (something about a hunk of code that the author claims is broken)
A: That code works just fine.

Glancing at the other questions, they look about the same (plus a lot of stuff like "What variable should be set to turn on TTFT mode in order to configure XMLG in WebGronk 7.61 for IETF compatibility with mode 3 client access?" -- things that someone competent should be able to find quickly, and that I would never expect anyone to have available in an interview). It's really clear that the author had no expertise in the areas covered, but simply skimmed some books and made up questions with little or no research or technical review.

If you think your next candidate is smart, you might want to hand them a copy of this book and ask them what they think of it.

This narrow minded, interrogation oriented guide is simply horrible. The only person to recommend this to is the job seeker -- to prepare you for the more mean spirited interviews. My advice would be to walk away, but if you really want the job, then awareness of this sort of interview practice might help you get hired.

As another reviewer observed, if companies really do follow this sort of advice, then they deserve the people they hire. Now, some companies may want a team of willing white shirts with heads full of programming language details. If you're one of those, buy the book. However, note that ascertaining real competence, creativity and aptitude take a back seat here; it's form over substance.

When I think about the very best "techies" I've hired and worked with over the past 30 years, many would not successfully pass an interview process modelled after the advice in this book. Unbelievable. The credentials for the author to write this book, as far as I can tell, are these: IT executive and horse trainer. I rest my case.

I bought this book to prepare for my interview as a C programmer. I got the job, but I can't blame the book entirely for this, since I did a lot of other preparation too.

The book was great for preparing though especially the telephone screening questions which werfe eeriely like the ones in the book. The sample C questions were also very useful and I was asked very similar questions to see if I "knew my stuff".

Don't let the title fool you, this is a good book for the interviewee too!

This book certainly helps managers interviewing programmers who claim expertise with many languages. If you own a J2EE shop and looking for Oracle and C++ expertise and need tough questions to ask....the questions prescribed in this book is good. Also note, this book does'nt help you as a reference for any other practical use of those languages.

This is another good book in the Job Interview series from Rampant. As with the other books, this book gives both the employer and the candidate guidance in areas such as work experience, personal appearance and education.

The questions that are provided in the book give a good base for the employer to ask the candidate. Of course, each company will need to modify or use only the questions that they will need.

I would recommended this book to any employer or candidate seeking a programming job in one of the languages covered.