5 ms·

It isn't that hard to isolate a block of code that addresses a small cross section of your business rules and ask a candidate to do something meaningful with it

It isn't that hard to isolate a block of code that addresses a small cross section of your business rules and ask a candidate to do something meaningful with it.

nearbuy 8y ago
That could be an excellent second, more involved, question. The first, super simple 2-minute sanity check question is to reverse a string. It's literally just a reverse for loop.
tome 8y ago
Then the complaint will be "they gave me a question about a really specific and hard to understand part of their code. It would have been easy to solve if I had familiarity with the concepts involved. Why didn't they just ask a similarly complicated question about strings instead?"
- pytester 8y ago
  That would be the complaint if you didn't isolate the code and explain the task properly. If you can't do that then you should probably worry about your own skills before testing somebody else's.
  - recursive 8y ago
    That's not really actionable. Even if my skills aren't up to pytester's standards, we still need to recruit developers now. And for what it's worth I doubt I'll ever be able to explain most of the tasks our business is doing what you refer to as "properly".
    - pytester 8y ago
      I joined a team two weeks ago that built a fairly complex machine learning pipeline. One week in I was told I needed to help interview a candidate. I lopped off a block of the code, made it run without the rest of the code base and explained what it was supposed to do. This wasn't that simple, but could still be explained in about a minute to somebody with familiarity in ML (assumed; that's what we're hiring for). I then challenged the candidate to spot any bugs and implement a feature. This really wasn't that hard. I've done the same thing twice before in two completely different industries. Why would that be impossible for you?
      - recursive 8y ago
        Perhaps I just don't understand what you're proposing. If it's general enough to be presentable without any domain specifics, then it seems indistinguishable from a general algorithm like reversing a string. I don't use tasks quite as simple as string reversal but not far from it. As I read it the main observable difference between your exercise and the kind of exercise you're arguing against is that you are starting with some baseline code that the candidate is supposed to modify. That seems like a pretty good idea, but I haven't used it yet.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

It isn't that hard to isolate a block of code that addresses a small cross section of your business rules and ask a candidate to do something meaningful with it.

nearbuy 8y ago

That could be an excellent second, more involved, question. The first, super simple 2-minute sanity check question is to reverse a string. It's literally just a reverse for loop.

tome 8y ago

Then the complaint will be "they gave me a question about a really specific and hard to understand part of their code. It would have been easy to solve if I had familiarity with the concepts involved. Why didn't they just ask a similarly complicated question about strings instead?"

pytester 8y ago
That would be the complaint if you didn't isolate the code and explain the task properly. If you can't do that then you should probably worry about your own skills before testing somebody else's.
- recursive 8y ago
  That's not really actionable. Even if my skills aren't up to pytester's standards, we still need to recruit developers now. And for what it's worth I doubt I'll ever be able to explain most of the tasks our business is doing what you refer to as "properly".
  - pytester 8y ago
    I joined a team two weeks ago that built a fairly complex machine learning pipeline. One week in I was told I needed to help interview a candidate. I lopped off a block of the code, made it run without the rest of the code base and explained what it was supposed to do. This wasn't that simple, but could still be explained in about a minute to somebody with familiarity in ML (assumed; that's what we're hiring for). I then challenged the candidate to spot any bugs and implement a feature. This really wasn't that hard. I've done the same thing twice before in two completely different industries. Why would that be impossible for you?
    - recursive 8y ago
      Perhaps I just don't understand what you're proposing. If it's general enough to be presentable without any domain specifics, then it seems indistinguishable from a general algorithm like reversing a string. I don't use tasks quite as simple as string reversal but not far from it. As I read it the main observable difference between your exercise and the kind of exercise you're arguing against is that you are starting with some baseline code that the candidate is supposed to modify. That seems like a pretty good idea, but I haven't used it yet.

deleted 8y ago

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