Today one of the Team Leaders at work disappeared for half an hour to interview a top earner for a C++ Developer position. He returned disappointed, the candidate couldn’t answer the basic questions.
When I started interviewing, I thought of some rather technical details to be thrashed out, discuassions of the virtual keyword in some detail and so on. I found that we simply never got that far. The candidates that were turning up for the advertised salaries struggled to get going. In the end, I too settled for a basic set of questions.
Learning programming is difficult. You have to learn about the sorts of problems that teachers might ask and you have to learn about answering them in the context of the programming language. The hope is that you’ll learn about general programming concepts and the programming language too. But in the end, you only become competent at something by spending time doing it.
In the real world one has to understand computer system architecture, the components in the system, how they interact, why they exist, what they do, what the problems are, how to solve them and finally, how to improve the system. The cannot be taught, it’s knowlegde aquired through experience.
