Better Software - January 2008 - (Page 80) The Last Word Here’s one of my favorites: What would you do if you were given the job of redesigning an ATM for use in a school for six- to twelve-year-olds? Everybody knows what an ATM is, but you’ve shifted the use to something unusual. A typical interviewee will start by thinking about the ATM’s look and feel and how to make it more attractive and usable for children. A smarter developer will think about security and how to use technology to solve the problem of sophisticated personal ID numbers. An even smarter developer will tackle the problem of linking ATMs to banks and figuring out what money source the children will access. Your decision on developers’ creative problem-solving skills should be based on how comfortable you would feel about implementing their plans for placing ATMs in elementary schools. EFFICIENT SOLUTIONS FOR MUNDANE PROBLEMS they’re filled with mundane tasks that require efficient solutions. For me, the second aspect of intelligence is the ability to solve daily, non-creative problems efficiently. To measure this, I like to give interviewees an algorithmic puzzle that has three or four different solutions ranging from obvious to complicated. My favorite goes like this: Given an unsorted array of X[100] that contains the numbers between 1-100 plus another number between 1 and 100, find the repeated number. A smart developer will sort the array—the two numbers will be consecutive. Another smart developer might use another array for hashing. A really smart developer would add them up and subtract the total sum of 1 to 100 (5050) from the total. Problems like this are common in a programmer’s life— making sure a developer can solve non-creative problems efficiently ensures your team is strong at all levels. are all great skills and would be nice to have in a remote developer. However, expertise in the target technologies, enthusiasm, and intelligence are the three essential skills. Sometimes, finding the needle in the haystack seems impossible. But given the right process and commitment on your part, it might not be as difficult as you think. {end} Sherif Koussa is a project leader with an eye on global development models. He has more than eight years of experience in secure software development and project management. You can reach Sherif at sherif.koussa@gmail.com. Teresa Wilde is a project leader at Macadamian Technologies, a software outsourcing company with headquarters in Canada and development offices in four countries. You can reach Teresa at teresa@macadamian.com. 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