W3Matter is taking a new approach to interviewing programmers: “write some code for us.”

They’re looking for PHP programmers, but they want to make sure their new code monkey has the goods. The first challenge involves some HTTP work, tag stripping, text extraction & parsing, filesystem I/O, and flat DBM storage. The second requests the prospective hire to explain, in a few paragraphs, how they would “determine which are the most important words on each page” and then design a database schema to store the results in either MySQL or PostgreSQL.

I’m tempted to run through the tasks tonight and see quickly I can knock them out. Make sure you check out Joe Grossberg’s original article over at his blog. I’m not above reblogging (apparently) and he’s always got some interesting tidbits on his feed to check out daily.