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It's not how I would code it but it sounds straightforward for someone who's done any jQuery, frankly. How did your candidates fail on this one? Did they just f

It's not how I would code it but it sounds straightforward for someone who's done any jQuery, frankly. How did your candidates fail on this one? Did they just freeze up and not try?

yeldarb 8y ago
They seemed to just not be able to grasp the asynchronous nature. Mostly confusion between calling a function and passing the result as a parameter and passing a reference to that function. But also struggling with the recursive nature of calling a function from inside of itself. I should also say it wasn't the syntax or JS/jQuery-specific aspects of it that were the problem. Most couldn't explain in English/pseudocode what their strategy for solving the problem would be.
- arandr0x 8y ago
  You may be filtering your pipeline according to the wrong criteria, and rejecting candidates strong in algorithms but weak(er) in JS specific or framework-specific stuff at a stage that's too early. Or those candidates may be unicorns -- usually the early-career people who like thinking about recursion don't jump into applying to frontend roles, which they see (wrongly IMO) as a lower tech, design-oriented kind of role. If it's an entry-level role and you don't have good signals for the steps prior to the interview, maybe consider a pre-interview assignment that includes some asynchronous concepts, and administer it much earlier in the pipeline. That's a slightly lesser investment but should be as good a signal. If it's a senior role, then your questions are way too easy, but also you should go on Linkedin and ask individual people with good experience to apply, that's what everyone else is doing. Edited to add: Well, I saw in your other answers that you are filtering candidates based on "really wanting" the job very early in the process... I work in a region that is not the hottest job market wise and even here no one could afford to do this. Software devs are just too in demand... you're going to get pretty mercenary candidates unless you go with personal referrals. If the non-technical aspects of the candidates are more important, which with your ordering of the hiring pipeline it sounds like they are, then you need to consider hiring fewer people and growing less fast, pr hiring for fit first and training the recursion skills later.

It's not how I would code it but it sounds straightforward for someone who's done any jQuery, frankly. How did your candidates fail on this one? Did they just freeze up and not try?

yeldarb 8y ago

They seemed to just not be able to grasp the asynchronous nature. Mostly confusion between calling a function and passing the result as a parameter and passing a reference to that function. But also struggling with the recursive nature of calling a function from inside of itself. I should also say it wasn't the syntax or JS/jQuery-specific aspects of it that were the problem. Most couldn't explain in English/pseudocode what their strategy for solving the problem would be.

arandr0x 8y ago
You may be filtering your pipeline according to the wrong criteria, and rejecting candidates strong in algorithms but weak(er) in JS specific or framework-specific stuff at a stage that's too early. Or those candidates may be unicorns -- usually the early-career people who like thinking about recursion don't jump into applying to frontend roles, which they see (wrongly IMO) as a lower tech, design-oriented kind of role. If it's an entry-level role and you don't have good signals for the steps prior to the interview, maybe consider a pre-interview assignment that includes some asynchronous concepts, and administer it much earlier in the pipeline. That's a slightly lesser investment but should be as good a signal. If it's a senior role, then your questions are way too easy, but also you should go on Linkedin and ask individual people with good experience to apply, that's what everyone else is doing. Edited to add: Well, I saw in your other answers that you are filtering candidates based on "really wanting" the job very early in the process... I work in a region that is not the hottest job market wise and even here no one could afford to do this. Software devs are just too in demand... you're going to get pretty mercenary candidates unless you go with personal referrals. If the non-technical aspects of the candidates are more important, which with your ordering of the hiring pipeline it sounds like they are, then you need to consider hiring fewer people and growing less fast, pr hiring for fit first and training the recursion skills later.