Job interview

Question

My company is looking for a new web developer, and we strive to find someone who would be effective as soon as they work and are able to make high-quality code. I will have to interview, and I would like to give them a task, so I see

• their general programming skills
• if they can use CSS
• overall product quality
• and possibly much more

The only problem: I do not have a good idea of ​​what to give them. Some of the candidates may work for some other company, so it should be something like 8 hours of work at maximum (for example, one week end), but it should be complicated enough to show your skills.

So far I have been thinking:

• contact manager
• CD / BOOK Manager
• a blog?

guys, if you have any opinions, please share!

In addition, the appointment will be in PHP using the Zend Framework, so it must accept the candidate calculation may not be as experienced with the framework.

Answer 1

I don’t think you should give them such a long “test”. In my opinion, if you want to do something like this, make it a simple 5-20 minute expression. Perhaps a small address book manager that stores the name / number and maybe 1-2 other fields. But nothing complicated. And tell them that it takes a simple style to look good, but nothing unusual is needed. If it were me, I really would not want to do “homework” for the interview.

Answer 2

I am an experienced software developer that fits your description, and I left the interview as soon as I was asked to do any unpaid work that would take more than an hour. Only desperate and / or inexperienced people are going to bite something like this, and not one of them will be able to immediately contribute to your project.

• Ask them to send a sample code.

• If they do not have a sample code that they deleted with previous employers, ask for a sample personal code.

• Google them and find what they created and what they sent you.

• Ask for a technical link and ask for a link, what kind of work they did

• Buy them based on unforeseen contractual or agreed costs. If after two weeks they do not meet your expectations, terminate the contract without any difficulties.

Answer 3

I do not think that many of these answers are taken from the side of the employer. Writing a function on a blackboard gives me a tiny look at someone potential, and essentially there is no real picture of efficiency. There is always a chance that they will remember a really cool way to change the line in place and remove duplicates from the list and count bits in bytes, because these questions are found all over the Internet.

I had interviews with people who turned out to be nothing more than posers (I think liars would be better for this), so I find it incredibly important to have some kind of tangible work. I am not saying 8 hours, but it gives you some best tips:

• How is it packaged - zip with assembly? Or a text file inserted in an email.
• Is there any documentation?
• Is there a reasonable algorithm or is it brute force?
• Are there objects or is this a whole mess of static gunk in one class?

We hire software developers who should be able to design, as well as code - the probation period should not be the first time a person writes more than the method for you - by the time the ass sits in place, you spent a lot of money, to find out they’re getting lost trying to write a business value method.

I admit that people can fake it on assignments (it’s usually, but not always, easy to clean up in an interview after assignment), I had a much better chance of hiring people with a good code assignment than hiring people with an excellent resume and an excellent interview.

If the work is not important for someone to spend a couple of hours writing some code (which we supposedly love to do anyway, right?), Then I'm glad that they don’t, t hire them .

Answer 4

It would probably be better if they wrote the code on a white board in person than to take homework. You can learn a lot more about the candidate in this way, for example, how effectively he / she solves problems and the thought process.

Giving them homework does not give you clues as to how effective they are. You can have two candidates, both of which refer to the same, but one of them did it twice as fast. You might not know.

I have to agree with other answers: if the interviewer asked me to do my homework for too long, I would not.

Answer 5

As others wrote, asking people to do so much work for free is offensive.

Assuming that you can find some victims, how confident are you that you can objectively explain which one has prepared a more perfect article?

Why are you so obsessed with the Zend framework? I would rather use someone who had a good understanding of programming, a good solution to problems and communication skills, than someone who can demonstrate competence with a very specific set of tools - presumably tools in which you already have a strong knowledge base.

Indeed, one of the things I'm looking for in candidates is that they can bring new knowledge and interpretation and how it can complement an existing team. I would even appreciate a good knowledge of procedural, OO, and non-procedural programming along with knowledge of HTTP for specific skills in PHP.

When I interviewed candidates for a post for PHP programming, I had a carefully prepared PHP script (about 1 page full), which was disgusting with errors and bad style (using register globals, header requests after starting the output), the function didn’t caused by using the numeric instead of associative arrays, args function in the correct order, using a computationally expensive function when simpler ones would surfed ....), which is only used for normal calls PHP functions and gave also 30 minutes (with access to a computer connected to the Internet), to determine what is wrong with him.

It also meant that they could conduct the test under controlled conditions.

I would hope that it was obvious to candidates that this would be solely a test of their abilities, and not all that I could learn from it - and debugging code is much more difficult than writing code.

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