[ANNOUNCE] [REMINDER] Social this Thursday - PLUS! free beer

[Peter Corlett]

On Wed, Aug 01, 2007 at 04:24:22PM +0100, Billy Abbott wrote:
> On Wed, 1 Aug 2007, Nicholas Clark wrote:
[...]
>> * What version control system do you use?
>> * How do you test the code?
>> * What is your release process?

> Those are three of the questions that we like hearing when interviewing at
> my place of work - however, we interview new grads mainly and don't get
> asked them as often as we'd like.

I shall add them to my list of questions to ask to look intelligent at
interviews, but I'm not actually particularly interested in the answers. If
they already have useful version control[0], testing framework and release
process, that's good enough. If they *don't* have any of those three, they
soon will have if I start working there.

How they answer just tells me if they're a bunch of cowboys or not, but I'll
have usually figured that out well in advance of getting into anything
technical. A Google Groups search for the company's primary domain name can
be *most* enlightening, especially if the first page of results are all from
news.admin.net-abuse.*.


[0] For these purposes, CVS counts as "useful version control" even if it is
    pretty awful and hardly state of the art. Emailing around tarballs and
    hoping Exchange doesn't eat too many of them is not.