How do you interview a VB programmer?

Hi

Looking to hire a VBA programmer to do some work at our company. What is the best way to determine a candidate knows how to do what we need done? I have a stack of resumes, all professing to be experts but how do I find out for sure in less than an hour?

Thanks in advance!

Well by most HR laws you can't ask much about the person intimately so stick with the basics.

1. Tell me about yourself (in regards to your programming background).
2. How long have you been programming? (if not answered in #1)
3. How long have you been programming in VB? (if not answered in #1 or #2)
4. Do you have a portfolio of examples or of your previous work?

What information is not in the job history of the application or resume, then those questions should suffice and answer most of the rest.

Narrow it down to a few based on personality and resume, then pick a simple project and have him go at it. We put a supposed Cisco engineer to the test once. We put him in a room with a router and the router won.

1. Reduce your stack of resumes to a small enough number that you can give a reasonable phone interview to each. Don't try to ask a huge amount of technical questions in the phone interview, but try to figure out whether they seem reasonably smart and like a good cultural fit.

2. For the best phone-interview candidates, have them come in and conduct in-person interviews with a few members of whatever team they would be working with. Force each interviewer to give a thumbs up/thumbs down. As part of this process, give them a computer and a relatively simple VBA problem (and a time limit). The interviews will prove that they are a cultural fit and sound competent. The code will prove that they know something about VBA.

3. If you find a qualified candidate, if at all possible hire them on a provisional basis (that is, ensure that for the first few months you can fire them relatively easily if they are not a good fit).

I would suggest the book Smart and Gets Things Done by Joel Spolsky. It's mostly adapted from his blog (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/, scroll down to the Recruiter section in the green box for some relevant articles). As a happy coincidence, he was instrumental in the creation of VBA.

VBA is not exactly a prestigious field, so be prepared for a fairly rough interview process.

VBA uses the same syntax as VB but you are working with the different set of libraries.
Just ask about Excel / MSWord Libraries or windows scripting.

Ask about debugging, everybody can write code, but it takes time to master debugging.

Have them program something simple or give a small existing project and tell him how u want it changed...something small tho that he could do in 15 mins and see how they handle it

You might even want to consider narrowing down your field by small projects alone. Base your choices by length of time it takes for the person to return the results as well as judge by how they present their code including things like comments, structure, and cleanliness in code.

I'm not sure if you're the hiring manager without knowledge of VB or if you know it inside and out.

1) An education in computer science from an accredited school is a good indicator of quality.

2) Look for a good attitude. A lot of software developers I've interviewed, and some I've worked with, have very bad attitudes. Being a jerk doesn't help you write better code. The attitude and friendliness of the person definitely matters.

3) References. If the person's developed software professionally, he or she will be able to supply professional references that you can check. The person you reach should be someone who's managed this person, and he/she should say good things about the work he or she did.

4) As others mentioned, there are tests you can find online. If you don't understand the source code yourself, then find a test that makes something happen.

5) As far as I can tell, VBA is a type of Windows programming. Microsoft offers certification exams for programming, which should make it easier to find a qualified candidate. Look for a Microsoft-certified developer.

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I have not done any tech hiring before. And to make matters worse, I can't program at all. We are filling this slot to take care of a legacy process, we don't have any VBA expertise in our shop.

Quote from roykirk1 : Thanks for the suggestions guys. I have not done any tech hiring before. And to make matters worse, I can't program at all. We are filling this slot to take care of a legacy process, we don't have any VBA expertise in our shop.

Quote from Aluvus : 2. For the best phone-interview candidates, have them come in and conduct in-person interviews with a few members of whatever team they would be working with. Force each interviewer to give a thumbs up/thumbs down. As part of this process, give them a computer and a relatively simple VBA problem (and a time limit). The interviews will prove that they are a cultural fit and sound competent. The code will prove that they know something about VBA.

I would have suggested this, but if you have no other team members that may be a problem. You may have to educate yourself on VBA enough to know what you are talking about, otherwise your role as an interviewer is no better than a biased personality tester. Also this person is going to have to report to someone, and that someone better have a grasp on VBA otherwise how are you going to judge someone's performance on the job? Does it work, does it not work? Sorry, but that's not enough and if the manager is in the dark the guy can come up with many excuses/lies to cover his ass and the manager won't know the difference. I would find someone who has a similar aptitude and start sending them to basic VBA classes.

Find a problem solver, not a programmer.

as for examples of previous code, and look at how well commented/documented it is - ask another programmer to do this if you can't read code

I don't do too much in VBA, but it can be very helpful when needed. I'm assuming your company is working on projects that require VBA currently. I would pose a question regarding one of those projects. I was given the tasks of copying Excel data directly into PowerPoint tables. I had no VBA experience, but I understood the logic needed to do so. I think by asking them that type of question you can get a good idea of their thought process and how quickly they can put it together.

Not every line should be documented.
With proper name convention you can read code AS IS

Public Sub MoveEXRow(ByRef EXWorkSheet As Excel.Worksheet, ByVal fromRow As Long, ByVal toRow As Long)
Dim xpFrom As Excel.range
Dim xpTo As Excel.range
Dim xpHome As Excel.range

Dim fromR As String
Dim toR As String

fromR = fromRow & ":" & fromRow
toR = toRow & ":" & toRow

EXWorkSheet.Application.CutCopyMode = False

Set xpFrom = EXWorkSheet.range(fromR)
xpFrom.Select
xpFrom.Cut

Set xpTo = EXWorkSheet.range(toR)
xpTo.Select
EXWorkSheet.Paste

EXWorkSheet.Application.CutCopyMode = False

Set xpHome = EXWorkSheet.range("A1")
xpHome.Select

End Sub

here you need some comments :

Public Static Function GetEXCol(columnIndex As Integer) As String
' columnIndex is the present column, not the number of cols
Const A = 65 'ASCII value for capital A
Dim iMults As Integer
Dim sCol As String
Dim iRemain As Integer
' THIS ALGORITHM ONLY WORKS UP TO ZZ. It fails on AAA
If columnIndex > 701 Then
GetXLCol = ""
Err.Raise vbObjectError + 1024 + 10, "Number is > 701"
Exit Function
End If

If columnIndex <= 25 Then
sCol = Chr(A + columnIndex)
Else
iRemain = Int((columnIndex / 26)) - 1
sCol = Chr(A + iRemain) & Me.GetEXCol(columnIndex Mod 26)
End If
GetEXCol = sCol
End Function