R help - Jan 2015 - Interview questions?

Folks,

I was wondering if anyone has put together a list of R job interview questions?

I?m thinking of about 5-20 possibly open ended questions for interviewing a
candidate to do R programming. Just programming. Not statistics or mathematics.

What I don?t want are tricky ?puzzles? that are more about how clever the
interviewer questions are than how to get the best person for the job.

I would consider myself a mid-level R programmer so this would also be a great
opportunity to learn more and be able to hire a great candidate.

I am perfectly happy to get a reference, book title or URL.

Not looking for anyone to do my work for me!

Best to all,
Happy New Year,
KW

On Sun, 11 Jan 2015, Keith S Weintraub wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone has put together a list of R job interview
> questions? I?m thinking of about 5-20 possibly open ended questions for
> interviewing a candidate to do R programming. Just programming. Not
> statistics or mathematics.
Keith,

   You're the best person to determine the questions to ask because
you're
the only one who knows what you want this programmer to do. What are the
criteria by which the coder's efforts will be judged successful?

   Ergo, make a list of what the hired coder is expected to do, then write
questions that ask about experience with this type of application, how best
to approach designing the application, and what other languages and
applications have been developed.

   Those are just spur-of-the-moment ideas but they could get you thinking
productively.

Rich

1.  What have they done in the way of R package development?  If they've
done that, then you can review packages they've worked on and ask questions
about that (the package development process as well as the documentation they
wrote) to see if that's of sufficient quality.


2.  What do they do to assure they produce "trustworthy code"?  [Hint:
The least they need to be doing, I think, is writing good examples on a package
documentation file that stop if they do not get the right answer  -- unit tests.
Anyone not doing that is a hack, not a professional.]


3.  Any questions about their knowledge of statistics as applied in your
particular kinds of applications.


4.  Their search strategies for finding other literature relevant to R code
development.  [Caveat:  I'm the lead author of the "sos" package
including its vignette.  For me, it's the fastest literature search for
anything statistical available anywhere:  In seconds, you can search all the
packages on CRAN and a few others for matches to your search term AND get the
results sorted by package, not by help page.  If what you want is there,
it's easy and quick to download it, try it, ... .]


Hope this helps.  
Spencer Graves

> On Jan 11, 2015, at 8:46 AM, Keith S Weintraub <kw1958 at gmail.com>
wrote:
> 
> Folks,
> 
> I was wondering if anyone has put together a list of R job interview
questions?
> 
> I?m thinking of about 5-20 possibly open ended questions for interviewing a
candidate to do R programming. Just programming. Not statistics or mathematics.
> 
> What I don?t want are tricky ?puzzles? that are more about how clever the
interviewer questions are than how to get the best person for the job.
> 
> I would consider myself a mid-level R programmer so this would also be a
great opportunity to learn more and be able to hire a great candidate.
> 
> I am perfectly happy to get a reference, book title or URL.
> 
> Not looking for anyone to do my work for me!
> 
> Best to all,
> Happy New Year,
> KW
> 
> ______________________________________________
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