Brainbench perl test

[Chris Jack]

One other point I wanted to make on this debate was:

No matter how strongly each of us feels about what is or is not a legitimate or worthwhile interview question: part of the benefit of having this discussion is finding out what other people think is important in an interview. Even if we sway the opinions of people in this forum about what interview questions to ask, at the end of the day interviewing is a game and being able to give more complete answers to less worthwhile questions is part of the process.

Hence these are the sorts of things we need to swot up on.

My general aim in an interview is to present the interviewer with a number of things they didn't know. Hopefully of which a few are of broad practical use. I might argue that memo-ization is a minor, occasionally useful feature of perl, but knowing about memo-ization shows I have studied perl in more depth than the people who don't know about it.

I also think it is good to be upfront in interviews about things you haven't done and somewhat humble in assessing your skill level. For the latter, the interviewer is unlikely to take your assessment at face value and over delivery in the interview is not a bad habit to get into. Perl is a huge subject and things like Moose start to challenge what the language is. Many modules are more like language extensions than perl per se.

I start to doubt that anyone is a master of all areas of perl any more. At which point I could go off and have a little rant about a number of people who have written about DBI who are obviously somewhat clueless about a few things about databases (but I won't).

Chris