Can't Code, Won't Code - The Shortest Technical Interview

 It's shocking, isn't it?

I mean, the nerve of some people!

I just finished a technical interview with a self-proclaimed "build engineer" - apparantly expert in .NET, Ant/NAnt, CruiseControl, continuous integration and all that jazz. His CV claims he's been doing it since Year Dot, so you'd think he'd be pretty good at it by now, wouldn't you?

So I hand him my laptop and ask him to write a NAnt script to compile a .NET project and run a suite of NUnit tests. That's kind of like the "Hello, World!" of build automation. I stay to pair with him, but, as it turns out, for nought.

He didn't even try. Didn't know where to start. And that's after I pointed him to the dozens of similar Nant scripts sitting on my laptop that he could have copied from. Shocking!

So I move on to the second part of the technical interview and tell him that I have a couple of C# development tasks I'd like him to try - just basic stuff like finding and fixing a fairly obvious bug (does he write a unit test first?, etc etc), and a small refactoring to sort out a well-known code smell called "data class". Again, I'm there to answer questions and to pair with him.

"I know C# well enough to converse with developers, but I'm not actually a developer", he replies.

End of technical interview. Can't write a simple build script. Can't write code.

Hmmm....

The agency who sent him calls it "search and selection", apparantly.

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