Project Integrate

Well, I assume you mean something like “procedures?”

Let's try, interview questions.

There are so, so very many really terrible “programming interview” or “skills quiz” services out there. Almost every one — actually, every single one I've ever looked at — has been absolutely painfully bad.

For starters, don't confuse “language lawyer” trivia questions for programming skill. I use Common Lisp every day and I didn't remember than “(cond (n))” is the same as “(cond (n n))” and I wouldn't judge anyone harshly for not knowing that edge case. I seem to recall that “??[“ may be a synonym for “{“ in C, but I don't care.

More important to me are questions of development processes. Here's an interview question I've used before:

“Suppose we have an inventory in our game, and we use it to contain invisible (to the player) 'game progress flags. This is an item that shows that the player has completed some task, and we might look in their inventory before, say, presenting a certain dialog option. Now, we want to extend it so that an NPC who's asked a question that's only available if the player has such a flag will now 'remember' that the player has this flag, and can pass that information to other NPC's in turn. How would you implement this?”

I'd then go on to discuss their implementation plan, how it compares to our architecture, and suggest changes and see how they adapt or defend their design in various cases. I'd also probe their intentions on testing and deployment strategies.

Usually, I only prepare about 3 or 4 such things, always based on actual things we've done or want to do in future. Each discussion can easily range to 20+ minutes, by the end of which, I generally have a feel for someone's abilities and sense of craftsmanship.

And what if they don't have any skill in the language we're using? That's far easier to teach than the actual skill of programming. Another way is to hire remote developers​ and outsource all your technical headaches.