[R] Interview questions?

Spencer Graves spencer.graves at prodsyse.com
Sun Jan 11 19:12:01 CET 2015


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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