Those 3 PHP questions

Hi PHP Gurus,

I have a question for you all. If you are asked to interview a candidate with 5 years of experience in PHP and you are allowed to ask only 3 theoretical questions and based on the answers of those 3 questions you have to select / reject the candidate. What would be those 3 questions?


Thanks & Regards



PS: Mods, if this is not the correct section pls move this thread to the appropriate one.

 

1. I would ask them to explain the principles of MVC (should separate the men from the boys).
2. Perhaps as a follow on question ask them their favourite MVC framework (and ask to explain why).
3. Ask them to talk about some PHP best practices.

 

Thanks Alex.

I like the 3rd question of yours. The 1st and 2nd one are very obvious type questions and are commonly asked in the interviews.

 

A better question would be when a MVC should be used. We seem to live in a day and age where we believe Frameworks help us write shorter more efficient code. However I would rather write 25 lines of PHP code as appose to 20 lines of setting up the framework that comes with 20,000 lines of fluff.

 

You never know what the questions might be but you need to be get prepared about the facts that anything can be asked. Be prepared.

 

i would ask them 1) what are associative arrays? 2) i would ask them about CURL library?3) how to put the safe mode off in php?

 

What's their job going to be?

Secondly, I would never hire or even consider someone based only on any number of arbitrary questions. Get coding examples, references, actual projects they have worked on and what their role was, etc.

 

I used to ask a following question with programmers

what is a different between a string encapsulated in single quotes and in double quotes

and believe me many five year experienced people do not know about this.

Rest and SOAP Web Services / localization / MVC / Query optimization / Clustered Website, are good options

If candidate claims to work on any famous framework like cakePHP , Zend, Wordpress etc. Questions should be asked accordingly.

 

You could also ask about unit testing and design patters (singleton, factory etc)

 

I think these would be very important at least conceptually in an interview situation.

It's conceivable that someone doesn't have a ton of experience specifically with something like MVC, but they should have an understanding of why it's used and the pros and cons of using it. Unit testing is going to weed out a ton of developers, as is discussing version control like subversion or git. However, version control wouldn't be a deal breaker by itself IMO, since it's quite possible that they haven't worked on projects with many other developers.

The reason I originally asked, what's their job going to be, is that there is no way to make relevant questions unless you know what sort of programming or supervisory position this is going to be. There would be a significantly different set of questions based on what position they are actually being hired for.

 

1. MVC questions.
2. Explain OOP and how it's used in PHP.
3. Best practices.

Probably some overlap there, but I think that covers most of the important stuff.