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You're looking at this the wrong way IMO. One should not give exercises and try to eliminate candidates, instead they should prepare a set of exercises so that
by blub 7y ago
You're looking at this the wrong way IMO. One should not give exercises and try to eliminate candidates, instead they should prepare a set of exercises so that at the end, if the candidate solves them correctly they can confidently say "this candidate knows X, Y and Z", so they should do a good job in our project.
In your case, at the end you've only figured out that your candidate knows how to sort an array, which even high-school students can do. You can confidently say that your candidate has a level somewhere between student and Donald Knuth, a pretty useless piece of information.
Is there any connection between sorting arrays and spanning trees? If I'm not mistaken, the latter involves graphs.
- varjag 7y agoProblem is however that a good crop of candidates doesn't know how to sort an array, am not sure why am finding myself explaining it for the 2nd time. So all I can say is they are below high school student in your neck of the woods, even if they have Masters in relevant discipline. And if you can't sort an array with all help of Wikipedia and Stackoverflow, you would not be able to walk a graph, let alone do anything useful with it. So I'm not quite sure what is your beef with it exactly. Do you think I should have used a more complicated task? Like, Dijkstras' on a graph? Are you sure that you wouldn't find that objectionable too, given that sorting an array is apparently asking too much?
- scarface74 7y agoLet’s say someone didn’t know any sort algorithms since he has been using one provided by the language. Would you have been willing to explain on a high level how the algorithm works? I wouldn’t be opposed to any algorithmic type question if you explain the requirements on a high level and let them do it within an IDE. But, you are hiring for a software developer, who should be able to translate business problems that you face everyday into a working system. Don’t you have any real world scenarios that you could use to test on?
- varjag 7y agoI would be willing to explain sorting to someone without formal CS training, but not to one with Masters degree in the discipline. They had 5 years to figure it out.
- blub 7y agoI was saying all along that your exercise: a) is too easy b) doesn't have enough meat to differentiate between junior / regular / senior c) covers very little if anything at all from what a SWE does on their day to day. OTOH I guess/hope you had more things, not just this.
- varjag 7y agoIt was a junior position. This was the only coding test but we also either talked through opensource code candidates brought in or discussed some parts of one our real project here.
- scarface74 7y agoSeeing that the Bubble Sort was something I did in 6th grade in the 80s as part of an AppleSoft BASIC programming class - congratulations, the interviewer has now proven he can hire a programmer with the skillset of a middle schooler....
- varjag 7y agoI would totally hire a middle schooler who can program over a PhD who can't. That said the guy we hired did an insertion sort.