3 ms·

I'm very comfortable with never hiring a backend programmer for whom this is an insurmountable obstacle.

by apetresc 9y ago

gowld 9y ago
There are plenty of surmountable obstacles that are a waste of interview time. Why give a jr admin task that any teenager can do as a test for a professional programmer?
- walshemj 9y ago
  It does test for having a wider skill set that just memorising a text book. Ill give you an example of a task that I got in my 2nd/3rd year of employment. Came into work and was presented with an exotic (for the time) piece of hardware (A0 digitizer) that cost 3x my salary to be asked to. 1 Connect it up and get it talking to a PDP 2 Research and Write the code to allow the kit to interrupt the os and transfer the data to a second program (this is on RT11 which only allowed 1 process normally). 3 Work how to initialize and calibrate the kit 4 Was asked to go and chat with one of the senior engineers and work out how to use the kit to digitize the results from his experiment to produce a 3d representation of the droplet cloud - z axis was done by using a camera with a very tight focal plane
mywittyname 9y ago
It's not insurmountable, but it's absolutely time consuming, especially when it's not a regular aspect of your job. I recently had to do exactly this for a prototype that I built and it took up a good 10-20% of my total project time. Another way to look at this is, are you more concerned with testing a person's end-to-end or development skills? There's no right answer, but you have to realize that testing one comes at the expense of the other. If your company often uses brand new development stacks, it might be important to test a candidate's ability to do exactly that, but if your company has a framework in place that everyone uses, then it's probably best to focus on a candidates pure dev skills.

3 ms·

I'm very comfortable with never hiring a backend programmer for whom this is an insurmountable obstacle.

by apetresc 9y ago

I'm very comfortable with never hiring a backend programmer for whom this is an insurmountable obstacle.

gowld 9y ago
There are plenty of surmountable obstacles that are a waste of interview time. Why give a jr admin task that any teenager can do as a test for a professional programmer?
- walshemj 9y ago
  It does test for having a wider skill set that just memorising a text book. Ill give you an example of a task that I got in my 2nd/3rd year of employment. Came into work and was presented with an exotic (for the time) piece of hardware (A0 digitizer) that cost 3x my salary to be asked to. 1 Connect it up and get it talking to a PDP 2 Research and Write the code to allow the kit to interrupt the os and transfer the data to a second program (this is on RT11 which only allowed 1 process normally). 3 Work how to initialize and calibrate the kit 4 Was asked to go and chat with one of the senior engineers and work out how to use the kit to digitize the results from his experiment to produce a 3d representation of the droplet cloud - z axis was done by using a camera with a very tight focal plane
mywittyname 9y ago
It's not insurmountable, but it's absolutely time consuming, especially when it's not a regular aspect of your job. I recently had to do exactly this for a prototype that I built and it took up a good 10-20% of my total project time. Another way to look at this is, are you more concerned with testing a person's end-to-end or development skills? There's no right answer, but you have to realize that testing one comes at the expense of the other. If your company often uses brand new development stacks, it might be important to test a candidate's ability to do exactly that, but if your company has a framework in place that everyone uses, then it's probably best to focus on a candidates pure dev skills.