Dusty books

I was a developer from when I started in IT in 1988, through until the mid-nineties. I worked freelance and so I'd have an interview probably about once a year on average, and that process always included some technical questions. There was no standard set, so the quality of the questions varied enormously in difficulty and quality.  

Steve, who's now the Technical Director at work, was the first developer I hired and he gave the technical interviews to all of the people we took on subsequently. Over time, though, it became more and more pointless asking people how they would code something; it's all out there on the Web. 

If you don't know how to code something, these days, then you need to work out what you want to do, then search for a solution effectively, evaluate the results, and implement them. (Frankly, this is the way education should be heading and not the pointless exercise of revising for exams.)

Anyway, back when I was a developer - or programmer, as we called it back then - people would have manuals and reference books on their desks. If you had a return code from DB2 that you didn't recognise, for example, you'd go and hunt out someone with the relevant book. 

Indeed, in the early days our company, Steve and I had quite a library of books. They are still in the office, filling one and a half shelves, and steadily gathering dust. I can't remember the last time I saw someone open one.

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Reading: 'Pauline Boty: Pop Artist And Woman' by Sue Tate