Web Confection's avatar

Technical Interview Test

The company I work for has been trying to recruit software engineers for 2+ years with limited success. In 2+ years we have offered 6 people a role and only recruited two people, including myself.

We have a generic technical test which applicants are obliged to complete before interview and the standard of entry has been quite poor. Our test is a simple...

"...create a reusable command line solution in PHP, GoLang or Javascript and optimise the data in a CSV file according to XYZ..."

Even though we ask applicants to "show off" we've started to wonder if our test is a bit poo because the solutions have been below par.

Anyway, I wondered if any gurus here have come across any innovative technical tests that have impressed? We use PHP, NodeJS, Typescript/Angular, GoLang, Docker and more on the AWS platform.

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lostdreamer_nl's avatar

A few months ago a company gave me a very fun test, it was a bit big, but a good programmer could give a good example within an hour or 2.

The test was simply: Create a hangman game (frontend + backend).

It gave developers a chance to show off if they wanted (TDD + Angular + nicely readable backend code, abstractions etc.)

Even though I eventually didnt go through with the offering they gave me, the project was so fun I kept adding more and more games in the next few months, whenever I had an hour to kill I added a game.

That code is now still my go-to when a company wants to see some example code I wrote.

That said: This company also got a lot of dead-wood programmers. Having not enough people pass your test doesn't necessarily mean that your test is bad, it could very well be the quality of the programmers.

A lot of companies I worked for in the last 15+ years had trouble finding good programmers.

Web Confection's avatar

Thanks for that. I do think the world is short on good developers and wage demands are silly. Graduates with 12+ months experience wanting £40k+

The hunt continues.

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