See[Mike]Code is a nifty tool for conducting remote programming interviews. One of the comments on the site bemoans the potential downsides of asking real programming questions during interviews:
The problem is often with the interview questions, for example:
“Write a loop that counts from 1 to 10” or “What’s the number after F in hexadecimal?”
As a web developer who has 5 years experience and build a number of large web applications for satisfied clients, I have never had to do anything with hex and simply would not know the answer in an interview.
However if I needed to do it in a job I would reference the API’s and be able to answer this in less than 2 minutes….
— ProgrammerJ
I don’t doubt that the commenter is a successful web developer, but no amount of API documentation would fix not knowing what hex notation is. Some basic computer science knowledge is required to capably consume technical documentation.
