[mighty]

> She seemed kind of flaky but I assumed it was because she was a lot smarter than I was. I pressed on, and an hour later I discovered that she didn't know what a typical size for a C pointer was.

That doesn't mean she's actually flaky or not smart. There's tons of info that smart programmers won't know off the top of their heads, either because they haven't worked in a given domain before, or haven't worked in it for a while.

She may well not have been qualified depending on what level of domain familiarity was expected from the get-go, but this implies nothing about her intelligence or capacity for domain competence.

[willchang]

Your making the claim that the above implies _nothing_ about her capacity for domain competence is a bit much. I thought it was a near-perfect diagnostic of her incompetence, and I'd be curious if anyone can sketch the profile of a very competent programmer, alive today, that doesn't have an inkling of the above fact. I don't think you can.

[mighty]

The problem is that you're conflating incompetence with a lack of capacity for competence. In other words, the mere fact of not knowing something implies that one can never know it. If that were true, nobody would know anything.

What I'm saying is, you may well be correct in your assessment that she was incompetent for the job, but that assessment doesn't qualify you to make the further implication that's she's not smart, or inherently incapable of competence.

I've noticed you added the bit about her being indignant and suggesting that such knowledge was beneath her. That does suggest she would be resistant to acquiring domain competence, which certainly doesn't bode well even if your company was open to letting the hiree acquire it on the job. On the other hand, I can understand her getting pissed off about someone using such a question as a litmus test.

[DenisM]

People who program their entire lifes in high level languages may not need any of this stuff. For example

  * SQL
  * Lisp
  * Haskell
  * Python
  * (I ran out, but please feel free to continue)