[Web4lib] Offtopic: Interviewing and Hiring a Web Developer

[Sharon Foster]

They should also be able to talk about it at length: explain the
customer's requirements and how they were elicited, what the technical
challenges were and how they were solved, how they arrived at the
database design (if a db is involved), what the maintenance plans
are...This gets to whether they just knocked the site together over
the weekend, or really analyzed the customer's needs and designed the
website accordingly. This was one of my favorite types of questions
when I was a software engineer: "Tell us about your current project."
That uncovers whether I understand the goals of the entire project, or
just my little corner of it.

Another good question along the same lines is to present an actual
project that you may have in mind, and have the candidate interview
you to find out what you "really" want. I like the traffic light
question as one indicator of problem-solving skills, but I wouldn't
stop there.

On 6/29/07, John Fereira <jaf30 at cornell.edu> wrote:
[snip]
> The other thing I have always done when interviewing programmers is
> to ask them to bring something that they wrote that they can
> demonstrate.  If you're interviewing a web developer they should be
> able to show you a site or two that they created.
>
>
> John Fereira
> jaf30 at cornell.edu
> Ithaca, NY
>
> _______________________________________________
> Web4lib mailing list
> Web4lib at webjunction.org
> http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
>


-- 
Sharon M. Foster
F/OSS Evangelist
Cheshire Public Library
104 Main Street
Cheshire, CT  06410
http://www.cheshirelibrary.org

Any opinions expressed here are entirely my own.