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I've written about this a few times before. I've done many interviews over the last 2 years. Before I started at that company, their interview process was prett
by rorrr 16y ago
I've written about this a few times before. I've done many interviews over the last 2 years. Before I started at that company, their interview process was pretty much as the article described.
We started by designing a set of technical interview questions. A few simple ones, like reverse a string. A more complex ones, like reverse digits in an integer. And then even more complex and practical ones with algorithms, but still very trivial. At first another developer and I thought they were too easy.
When we started interviewing, we made a shocking discovery that around 90% of the candidates can answer even simple questions. Very few people can write a correct function to reverse a string. Just think about it. These are the people that will have to write complex production code.
Out of 50 people I think we had one guy who answered all the questions. A few times we allowed candidates to use their laptops (it was their choice), one candidate spent like 30 minutes writing the reverse function, didn't really help him.
Our success rate was pretty much 100%, we have not hired one bad developer.
TL/DR: always ask interviewees to write some code.
- 3pt14159 16y agoWhat language was this in? In ruby this would just be "hello".reverse, and even if you didn't have that available to you there would always be: acc = "" ; "hello".size.downto(1) {|i| acc += "hello"[i-1]} or the more rubyist way of doing it "hello".each_char.to_a.reverse.join Or probably something more clever I can't think of at the moment. Was the language so crippled that they were worrying about UTF8 characters? It can't possibly be that 95% are that bad. How could they possibly do anything?
- rorrr 16y agoWe ask not to use the built-in reverse function. And for the number reversal we ask not to fall back to strings.
- rorrr 16y agoSorry, didn't answer your question fully the first time, was in a rush. The languages we interviewed for were Javascript and PHP (for different positions). There are lots of newbies out there who pick up the basics of these two languages (due to their popularity), and then try to get high paying jobs. Most of them are used to copy/pasting the code from the internet. That's extremely prevalent among Drupal developers. Drupal has a ton of contributed modules, so you can get pretty far without writing a single line of code. It's really really hard to find a good Drupal developer. I'm completely serious about 90% not being employable (by my standards).