How to hire programmers using online coding test

http://recruiterguide.hackerearth.com/how-to-hire-a-programmer-using-online-coding-test/

by saching90 • 13 years ago

19 59 13 years ago

recruiterguide.hackerearth.com

liranz• 13 years ago

This looks interesting, though I don't agree with the "most candidates cannot write code to simple algorithm" thesis.

I interview A LOT. Almost 100% of the candidates I receive cover the basic programming abilities. The real problem is that they don't know how to THINK.

I talk with them 20 min on the phone when they have to present a problem they had and how they solved it. Then I try to find out what they find interesting.

Giving a mini project is a good idea, but it does not scale well, and still requires a lot of resources top candidates will just not be willing to invest.

lrem• 13 years ago

A simple programming task adds 20 minutes to the burden of the interviewee, costs you next to nothing and weeds out the folk who don't actually know how to program. If someone fails to print prime numbers below 100 in 20 minutes, there is something wrong with his skills.

penguat• 13 years ago

And is this a buyer or a seller's market? If it's a buyer's market then you can give the interviewee as many tests as you like. If it's a seller's market... you'd better have something really good going for you!

7Figures2Commas6• 13 years ago

1. Write program that prints prime numbers below 100.

2. ?

3. Profit!

Interviews are a two-way street. If you're looking to hire an experienced developer and the best you can do is ask him to do something that he'll probably never have reason to do on the job, you're sending a pretty strong message about your company.

If you're going to ask somebody to code (or solve a problem) as part of the interview process, there's nothing worse than being lazy in creating the task. "Print prime numbers below 100" falls under the lazy category.

potatolicious• 13 years ago

There's a fence here - a bimodality if you will. I've been on both sides of it.

I used to do a large amount of phone screening for Amazon, probably over a hundred in all by the time I got sick of being a professional interviewer. I experienced much of what the author did: the bulk of the candidates had zero algorithms or data structures knowledge and could not program. Not "can't program well" or "can't program at a professional level", we're talking "I don't trust you with a simple shell script".

Now I work for a rather more obscure startup - we're relatively well known in the tech scene around here, but we're by a very long shot not a mainstream household name. The caliber of people that come through the door now is vastly different. I've interviewed some duds here, but have never interviewed someone in this position that just outright couldn't code.

The question I have for the author is who he hires for, and how much they pay. The low end of the software industry is plagued with people who have no business calling themselves programmers. It's really a vicious cycle - there's a large segment of our industry where the typical skill level is disastrously low, which causes ever more bureaucratic and ever more absurd filtering mechanisms to be invented, which further alienates programmers who have any real choice in employers.

Nowadays I'd be mildly insulted if given a FizzBuzz during an interview - but I used to do the same out of necessity, because 25% of my candidates couldn't pass it.

013• 13 years ago

Error establishing a database connection

gregors3• 13 years ago

it must be a bug in the bubblesort!

whizzkid2• 13 years ago

I am not agreeing on this. Unless you are hiring an expert, most of developers out there earning their lives by coding can not write a simple bubble sort when you give them a console. Not because they don't have the capacity, They will either not remember the algorithm at the moment or haven't had a such situation requires similar approach at their previous work. If you really want to know if he/she knows stuff, ask him a task/question/bug and let him explain how he would solve it. if he is good, he will start telling the approach in different aspects, he would even start writing you a pseudo code to solve it.

The approach taken in the article is not explaining how to HIRE programmers.

It is about how to ELEMINATE them.

RHSeeger• 13 years ago

To be fair, eliminating a fair portion of candidates (assuming the test does a good job of identifying the ones you wouldn't hire) isn't a bad thing. Time is a valuable resource.

whizzkid2• 13 years ago

always write tests while programming :) you did not cover the whole task!

// Your code

  if "Time is a valuable resource."
    Don't waste employers' time
  end

// Refactor

// Adds candidates' time to the case

// Decreases listOfCandidates() loading time.

  if "Time is a valuable resource"
    Publish a well-detailed job position
  end

ebbv2• 13 years ago

The site has been crushed under the HN traffic (and wherever else this link is propagating today.) So I can only state my opinion on the title which is; this is a terrible basis on which to decide who to hire.

I would never hire anyone without having an actual conversation with them. Whether I can get along with the person, if they will be a good fit for our team is the most important criteria.

Test taking is not an important skill for any job I'd be hiring for.

nandemo• 13 years ago

Please consider refraining to comment on a story if you haven't read it. It just adds noise.

Case in point, the article does not recommend hiring without talking to the candidate.

ebbv2• 13 years ago

I usually don't, but in this case the title irked me and sounded like they were advocating just that. Otherwise, what was the point of the blog post (since coding tests are completely standard in the industry)?

Now that it's recovered I see that it was just to shill the author's particular coding test.

Yawn.

7Figures2Commas6• 13 years ago

I always find it funny that half the people/companies advocating these approaches can't even keep a simple WordPress blog up when faced with a bit of traffic.

Surely there must be an algorithm for that?

coldcode• 13 years ago

I guess they didn't pass that test.

aetimmes• 13 years ago

There's no equivalent "online coding test" for admins, unfortunately.

7Figures2Commas6• 13 years ago

Do you mean to tell me that the guy who created a bubble sort algorithm on a whiteboard during his interview can't set up and manage a WordPress blog that scales reasonably well, and that I need to hire a dedicated systems administrator?

twic5• 13 years ago

Where i work, we give prospective sysadmins the same simple programming problems as programmers. Our infrastructure is run with automation - Puppet, plus lots of juicy devopsy madness written in Ruby - so our sysadmins do need to have at least rudimentary programming ability.

If they pass that, we don't give them any more programming tests. We give them a hands-on sysadmin assault course problem, where they have to SSH into an EC2 box that has been carefully broken by our devious chief sysadmin, find out what's wrong, and fix it. They do it in a tmux session, with some kind of audio link (Skype, Hangout, etc), so one of our guys can watch and talk to them as they do it. I've listened to several people running through it, and it sounds terrifying.

arikrak• 13 years ago

I hosted my WP blog for free on OpenShift and (with free Cloudflare) it was able to handle Reddit/HN traffic spikes without a problem. Not sure why everyone doesn't do something similar.

Killswitch3• 13 years ago

cache, cache, cache... Reddit and HN do not really send a lot of traffic... It baffles me to see peoples sites go down for 20k+ unique visitors total for the day... I've seen basic Wordpress installs with a few tweaks such as caching in place handle hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a day every day for months... It's not rocket science..

saching904• 13 years ago

Thanks for sharing this :)

saching904• 13 years ago

You spend day and night on building a product, you make sure everything works right and its scaled for traffic. Once you have a beta product ready, you decide to blog about it, you meticulously work on generating some good content, fire up a large instance on AWS, set up a wordpress blog, and the blog is live. Now you decide to post about it on HN, fortunately some people like what you have written, you start getting traffic.

And BOOM, suddenly you find out that the large instance on AWS, cannot handle the traffic, you are befuddled its not like the server is getting million hits/sec. You thought a large server would be enough to handle a single wordpress blog, and you realize that's not the case.

Now you go back and start fixing your self hosted wordpress blog, you feel sad that you missed out on audience because the server crashed, your work gets derailed because now you also have to maintain the blog server.

I agreed I too would have been irritated to see the link not working, but its not that you switch to an x-large instance each time you post a link on HN. Sometimes you just want somethings to work. But alas that's not the case.

swamp40• 13 years ago

So is there a simple solution?

eshvk2• 13 years ago

HN is not the place for parody but I want to rewrite your entire paragraph talking about developers who ship gigantic systems and suddenly find out that a company is rejecting them because they don't code the intricacies of bubble sort on a white board from the get-go.

7Figures2Commas6• 13 years ago

I empathize with you, but your experience highlights the flaws in the approach you're advocating.

I'll use myself as an example: I'm a self-taught developer who has built and managed high-profile, high-usage websites/web applications. I probably could not pass one of your algorithm-based FizzBuzz tests, but if I was hiring and you suggested that a site should scale simply because you threw it on a large AWS instance, I would not consider your candidacy further regardless of your ability to pass a FizzBuzz test.

pramodliv1• 13 years ago

Obligatory google cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

mathattack• 13 years ago

There's certainly an irony on the link to a programming test not working.

scrabble• 13 years ago

It's not a candidate's problem that they can't code? I think the candidate has a level of responsibility here. Really they shouldn't be applying for a development position if they can't code.

VLM7• 13 years ago

Two hilarious observations about stereotypical business programming culture:

Before hiring, tech fit decisions are made by elaborate pretend tests and painfully detailed technical discussion upon people who supposedly needed to gain years of experience in a specific field. After hiring, tech fit decisions are made by a PHB glancing at the cover of PC magazine and saying "make it so, number one" and the existing staff starts googling furiously and supplies something workable in a week or two even if they never heard of the technology the day before.

At 2pm "Work at home, are you crazy? Without my direct supervision hovering over your shoulder I'd appear unnecessary and you can't be trusted to accomplish anything at home and nothing can ever be accomplished individually, things can only be done by a team where a sociopath will take all credit for the teams effort" or, uh, usually a little more carefully phrased but this is what they actually mean. But at 2am the tone changes "well of course you can work at home at 2am to fix any emergency all by yourself in a completely undocumented system you've never heard of before and we trust you'll always be available 24x365 and never out of town or drunk"

clueless123• 13 years ago

I understand the frustration of sifting through hundreds of "fake" resumes where candidates can't code a fiz-buzz, but from the other end it is a total waste of my time spending 20 minutes of my time solving these coding challenges every time I want to know more about a prospective position.

If would be nice if the recruiter agencies (who are actually getting paid to do a job), would hire people qualified to understand if a candiadate is or not up to par for the job from a quick email or phone call.

saching904• 13 years ago

I believe a well written 'Job Post' also plays a pivotal role in attracting the right kind of talent.

zby• 13 years ago

There is another copmany that has been doing this for years: http://codility.com/ (I am an investor there).

eshvk2• 13 years ago

Excellent. I love when things like this get more visibility. Now, let me go make notes on my book of all the red flags of why I should stop talking to a company.

As a candidate, I understand the system is incredibly broken. Maybe one way out is to have recruiters who have a technical background. I have seen that happen with exactly one company where the lead recruiter had a BS from MIT. She was awesome and a genuine pleasure to talk to. Also, she had enough of a understanding of the company stack that the interview acted like a semi-filter.

robalfonso• 13 years ago

I don't use standard tests when hiring (read: to weed out candidates)

I'm in the process of hiring again as the team is growing and this has struck a chord with me.

I tend to see a resume, if it looks at all decent I will do a interview. Some would say do a call or give them a test to weed out etc. I've done enough interviewing to know that

1) people almost always are different than what their resume portrays for better or worse. 2) body language is 90% of our communication so why waste time on the phone. 3) If its so important to get someone I deem as a good fit I want to meet them. 4) I "waste" a lot of time interviewing, but I get better at it each time and I've found people who would otherwise never have gotten into see me that were spectacular hires. Also I have lots of friends who hire and sometimes someone is great but not for me, the favor has paid off when its returned.

The bottom line is people are unique in many ways. Why try to push them into a standard mold or discard them if they don't fit.

P.S

With regard to testing I usually tailor a test of 5-6 questions AFTER the interview so I can evaluate anything I am not sure of after speaking to the potential hire. I also let them do it at home with their tools. I don't care to see if someone can work with me hovering over them, because I have not intention of doing so on a day-to-day basis.

dblumenfeld• 13 years ago

A nice attempt at something that http://codility.com has been doing well for ages (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1039140). Nice UI, still I like Codility programming problems much better.

How to hire programmers using online coding test

Related Stories