Interviewing

I’ve been heavily involved in interviewing recently, both as a candidate and offering advice from the “other side of the fence”.  I’ve been spending a lot of time working out in my head exactly what the best way of interviewing is.  Below is a summary of what I’ve come up with so far, with each point to be extended in later posts.

• Decide exactly what you’re hiring for, the role and the tasks to be performed by that role. 
• Test for aptitude, not specific knowledge.
• Questions need to be fair: if you’re going to ask for very answers to very specific things, then consider sending the candidate an outline/”reading list” before the interview. 
• Remember that a good team has a mix of people, skills and backgrounds.
• Expect no more or less of your candidate than you expect of yourself – that includes turning up on time, a certain level of dress, the ability to answer questions, particular technical knowledge, etc., etc.

More to come.

Creating a 2d Array in R

Simple, first of all create a variable that contains (n*m) elements

>  a = rnorm(100*100, mean=100,sd=1)

then dimension it

> dim(a) = c(1000,10)

where the first parameter is the number of rows, and the second the number of columns.  Easy.

Useful “R” Snippet

I am using R quite a bit at the moment and found a useful snippet of code to generate random “coin tosses”:

x <- sample(c(-1,1), 1000, TRUE)