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I would email the recruiter back asking for feedback on the project. The worst they can say is no, and at best you get some insight into their reasoning. Code

by twunde 3y ago

I would email the recruiter back asking for feedback on the project. The worst they can say is no, and at best you get some insight into their reasoning. Code review: For a senior dev, I would expect tests even if I didn't ask for them explicitly. I'm also surprised to see that the functions are in a generic utils instead of better named files. The reality: 1. other people are spending more time on these takehomes. 2. Being more senior means that there are higher expectations. 3. The takehomes are typically a qualitative assessment

formulathree 3y ago
> I would email the recruiter back asking for feedback on the project. The worst they can say is no, and at best you get some insight into their reasoning. Good tip. They already said in the rejection letter no feedback will be given. > For a senior dev, I would expect tests even if I didn't ask for them explicitly. Several people mentioned this. You're definitely onto something here. The thing here is that the code is mostly IO, not amenable to unit testing. For most web applications that has a lot of logic moves from database to web app to client to route, not much can be unit tested. Typically the best pattern to follow here is to segregate as much logic away from IO as you can and move it into pure functions. That's what utils.py is. But you'll see utils.py is so small there's not much there to be worth testing. (Dependency Injection and mocks is a more popular pattern for unit testable code but it makes things much more complicated and you end up writing a lot of mock code and the unit tests end up testing mocks more then the actual logic itself) The fact that utils.py is so small is an indicator that this web app is mostly an IO app and you have logic on the database dependent on logic on the server and vice versa which takes a lot of time to write "integration tests" for. Integreation tests are excessive imo for a takehome project. Believe it or not excessive adherence to unit tests is actually a quality of junior engineer. They aren't knowledgeable enough to practice nuance and to see when unit tests become completely pointless. But this is probably just my opinion. I think it's quite likely a lot of (senior) reviewers are following your train of thought.

by twunde 3y ago

formulathree 3y ago

> I would email the recruiter back asking for feedback on the project. The worst they can say is no, and at best you get some insight into their reasoning. Good tip. They already said in the rejection letter no feedback will be given. > For a senior dev, I would expect tests even if I didn't ask for them explicitly. Several people mentioned this. You're definitely onto something here. The thing here is that the code is mostly IO, not amenable to unit testing. For most web applications that has a lot of logic moves from database to web app to client to route, not much can be unit tested. Typically the best pattern to follow here is to segregate as much logic away from IO as you can and move it into pure functions. That's what utils.py is. But you'll see utils.py is so small there's not much there to be worth testing. (Dependency Injection and mocks is a more popular pattern for unit testable code but it makes things much more complicated and you end up writing a lot of mock code and the unit tests end up testing mocks more then the actual logic itself) The fact that utils.py is so small is an indicator that this web app is mostly an IO app and you have logic on the database dependent on logic on the server and vice versa which takes a lot of time to write "integration tests" for. Integreation tests are excessive imo for a takehome project. Believe it or not excessive adherence to unit tests is actually a quality of junior engineer. They aren't knowledgeable enough to practice nuance and to see when unit tests become completely pointless. But this is probably just my opinion. I think it's quite likely a lot of (senior) reviewers are following your train of thought.