Coding exercise during interview

[Weltchy]

Senior Developers shouldn't just have a top level appreciation of what ever framework they use, they should know it, inside out, back to front and be prepared to lecture about the subject!!!!!

[tay]

Sadly the "technical test" aspect is often an esoteric collection on irrelevant tecno-obscurities unearthed by the incumbent alpha geek

Very VERY true.

I think the test that the OP describes is pointless. Any decent developer has functions and classes (even code gen devices) to do all this stuff for them. If they are still coding it all by hand after being around long enough to be called a senior dev... they should be laughed at. I get my lead devs to have a chat rather than a techinical test... discuss previous projects , ask how they completed it.. why they used certain approaches.. pitfalls... advantages.. takes about 2 min to spot the blagger ftom the guy who knows what he is doing. This weeds out the guys who have bulltulipted experience on the CV. If the applicant can answer questions of old projects in a clear concise manner with references to personal experiences.. I almost guarnatee he wont have an issue putting some data on a page in a real woprk environment.. and he wont hand code it all.

[tay]

Senior Developers shouldn't just have a top level appreciation of what ever framework they use, they should know it, inside out, back to front and be prepared to lecture about the subject!!!!!

You can have thos in your team, I prefer developers who can communicate, and know how to find knoweldge quickly, as and when, required.. not some wierd anorak wearing uber geek with the personality and communication skills of a turnip.

[Weltchy]

You can have thos in your team, I prefer developers who can communicate, and know how to find knoweldge quickly, as and when, required.. not some wierd anorak wearing uber geek with the personality and communication skills of a turnip.

Why would you assume your not getting someone with those skills as well as knowing their product inside out. If I was paying someone £500 a day, I'd expect the complete package!!!!

[chicane]

You can have thos in your team, I prefer developers who can communicate, and know how to find knoweldge quickly, as and when, required.. not some wierd anorak wearing uber geek with the personality and communication skills of a turnip.

Quite. A good developer is made not by the amount of theoretical knowledge stored in their head - it's about their ability to discover and learn quickly, and solve problems effectively.

[DimPrawn]

No no, it's the ones who know that the Windows constant W_X4_IRQ_WAIT is 0x4f550dd2, BUT only on Win ME, on Win 2000 (pre SP2a, not SP2b which was not formally released), it is 0x4f550dd3.

That's the important things to find out.

Forget all this problem solving, communication, attitude rubbish.

[DimPrawn]

I made it all up to make the person at interview to feel small and insignificant and to ensure I remain the uber geek at the client.

[Bagpuss]

Sadly the "technical test" aspect is often an esoteric collection on irrelevant tecno-obscurities unearthed by the incumbent alpha geek.

True, but have they ever made a woman cum?

[veekay]

I am really sorry if I came across as criticising the interview process itself.

I do not have anything against the exercise. In fact I do think at a junior programmer level this will help weed out some wannables.

I have been coding database based applications for a while now and I know how the datalayer is architected. I could talk about the database, the ADO.NET mechanisms and the various objects used. However, long ago I have bundled these in libraries and use them to talk to the database. I do not use them everyday ( if I did my programming skills would be crap! ). I am also sure that any good company will have also written these libraries and if someone joins them they will just throw these libraries at him and tell him to use them. Any new employee would never code database connections from scratch in this instance. So what good was the exercise then ? It told the employer that this programmer can write database connection code properly. But they will never make him use that at work.

At a senior level I would expect an algorithm exercise or a serious discussion about ADO.NET architecture and other things. It is my opinion of course.

Also, do i take it that these kind of exercises are the norm these days? I might just spend a month or so writing all that code in the libraries and get back to the junior programmer levels.

Cheers guys to all those replied.
Veekay

[Stan]

By showing that you have a proper understanding of the underlying technologies, rather than having read a few tutorials on the library's website

Are there really people who can use Hibernate but don't know how to open a database connection? And if there were then finding out how to do such a simple task would only be a google away for them.

Being able to do all the things mentioned in the test on paper would also take ages and space unless they write everything in a simplistic procedural manner. I wouldn't want to hire someone who is outputting HTML 2 lines of code away from reading from a database.