5 ms·

I only accept paired assignments. If you are going to use my time, the least you can do is offer an equal amount of time on your side.

• nextlevelwizard 5y ago
  "Thank you for your time, we will keep you in mind. Next!" Point of programming assignment is to see if you can actually write code. No one is waiting for perfect implementation, just working code that fills the spec, documentation, and tests.
  • wongarsu 5y ago
    "here's a computer, please implement a function in $languageOnYouCV that receives two words and returns true if they are anagrams of each other, false otherwise, if time permits add some unit tests" seems to fulfill that need just as well, and should be quick enough that being in the room or not is more about what makes the candidate more comfortable and gives the most insight for the interviewer.
    • sethammons 5y ago
      That is where we interviewed as an industry 10 years ago. Then people noticed a few holes (what, they don't know fundamental $x!?) and those were filled. List vs map, complexity, tests, trees and traversal, http api stuffs, unixy things, and then into networking fundamentals, distributed systems stuff, etc. 10 years ago, nearly no candidate pulled a distributed queue solution in a design interview and now it is a standard answer in their pocket.
    • sdiupIGPWEfh 5y ago
      That sort of problem is about the right level of complexity for a candidate to show they can think about a problem, provide an implementation, and discuss alternatives. Something they should be able to do without ever studying or grinding LeetCode. However, there's always room for the interviewer to muck things up. For the anagram problem, there are a range of solutions, including elegant & inefficient, clever & efficient, and robust & efficient. Do you dock someone depending on which they reach for first? There's limited time, and a candidate may assume you're mostly interested in "how they think" and thus focus on the algorithm alone. After the interview, do you run the candidate's solution against test cases that you never mentioned, docking them for "missing" matters of casing or non-alphabetic characters? If the candidate themselves wrote unit tests, do you dock them for missing test cases you felt should have been included? Do you dock them for not checking for invalid inputs, even though the candidate might normally work in a type checked variant of the language that wouldn't have permitted that anyway? So many possible hidden assumptions. I know I've been rejected for similar unstated expectations in the past, and in retrospect, I know I've been guilty of doing the same to others.
      • htrp 5y ago
        At that point it's not a coding exercise, it's a full blown case study. This isn't a programming contest and your company isn't ACM
    • easymodex 5y ago
      Is the candidate allowed to use google? Just asking since it's a very easy task but I'd wanna doublecheck how to reverse a string in that language.
      • noisy_boy 5y ago
        anagram, not palindrome.
  • sildur 5y ago
    It helps me on filtering out shitty companies. I don't want to work in a place that does not value my time. And there are plenty of companies to work with.
• agent327 5y ago
  How does this work? Who is the other party (someone from the company?) and what do they contribute?
  • bosie 5y ago
    They contribute the evaluation and time-boxing