Programming Job Skills Test?

eclecticgeek asks: "I've recently finished a CS/SD degree at uni and the interviews are starting to come thick and fast. I've yet to have a skills test for any of them, and it's only a matter of time before I do. I'm hoping to do one this week and I will get the choice of language. The position is quite broad and they're more after competent programmers in general, rather than any one specific language. So I'm wondering, have you done a developer skills test? What type of things did you get asked?"

Comments

Don't fret over this

[marcus]

Sometimes it is not the code that counts, but your approach. Are you applying for a software "design" position? If so, then show some evidence of designing something before you code. Consider the position you are targeting. Application software? Embedded firmware with restricted resources? Is pure speed important? Code size? Maintainability? Portability? Ask for a more detailed spec if what is given is too vague, or just put comments in your code showing where things should/could be changed if your interpretation of the spec is wrong.

If you are competent, you'll be OK. Every coding position I've ever had included a skills test, except one. The one exception was for a position at a company that I had already worked for in the past...

I've done a few

[jd]

Most have asked for samples of code. Typically, this has been where the requirements were for things like PHP, ASP (bleagh!), Javascript and other web-based stuff.

Jobs that have required "application" programming have typically set specific tasks. One I did wanted a search engine for web pages.

Yet others have involved very specific technologies. These are usually but not always in the form of a certification-style test. One that I did of this sort involved the real-time aspects of the ACE/TAO implementation of CORBA.

It depends a lot on the company as to what they are actually looking for. Bleeding-edge companies are likely to be more interested in novel solutions, for example, because it shows you can think and not just copy. ROTM companies, on the other hand, want things done fast and never mind the details. Any company that brags about ISO 9000 is likely a stickler for standards, whether the solution is any good or not.

General Logic

[web_boyo_in_sac]

I got this at my last job as part of my second interview, thankfully it was a take home "quiz".

"You are stranded on a deserted island, thousands of miles from nowhere you are forced to survive with what you have.

You have a handful of nails, a hatchet with a hammer head, 100 feet of rope, a large lens and a few dozen square yards of sail cloth.

The island has a variety of birdlife, fishing and crabs, but mostly inedible seeds, very acidic but edible berries and a large grove of coconut palms.

One side of the island seems to be geothermally active with several hot springs and some sulfer smelling vents, and a large variety of volcanic rock, obsidian and flint along with some hematite and copper deposits.

Now given this very restricted and scientifically unplausible situation, how would you survive?
Please take as much time as you need and give as thorough an answer as possible."

Re:General Logic

[GlenRaphael]

I'll take a brief stab at it.

Immediately, you need water, food and shelter. Shelter is the easiest: tie a length of rope between two palm trees, drape the sail cloth over the line and weigh down the corners appropriately; you've got a basic pup tent or tube tent to (somewhat) protect yourself from the sun and the wind.

You can get water from coconuts a la Cast Away. Use the obsidian to fashion spear heads for fishing, and the flint to sharpen your axe. (You can actually catch fish in a river with your hands alone - I'm not sure if that applies here. In any case, tools are a good thing. ) Crabs should be pretty easy to catch with the help of a cup or a basket or a spear.

Use the "large lens" to start a fire for warmth at night and to cook the fish. And perhaps to look for ships.

Medium term: Build a big SOS sign and have moss handy to throw on the fire for smoke to signal any passing plane or boat. Build a more permanent shelter. Explore the entire island and inventory everything on it.

Long term: Build a smokehouse. Find ways to accumulate and stockpile excess water and food and firewood beyond your daily needs -- especially water. If no rescue boat shows up, ultimately build a raft or sailboat and take your chances.

Eat the berries every once in a while so you don't get scurvy. I don't know enough metalurgy to do anything with the sulfer/hematite/copper, but it's not clear you need it anyway. Do you? What am I missing? If I knew metalurgy I'd probably want to cast more nails or make a drill bit...

Re:General Logic

[bladesjester]

Actually, copper's even easier than that. Copper is one of the few metals that can be worked in a fire as cold as a campfire (this is where I put on my smith's hat).

In order to extract the copper, all you really need to do is break the rocks up into smallish pieces and toss them in the fire. when the fire has gone out, remove the rocks, and dig the copper out of the sand. To work it, just build another fire to heat it.

You don't want to hammer it cold. It cracks like you wouldn't believe.

To extract the iron from the hematite, you'd basically need to make a crude bloom forge or a primitive smelter. The palm fronds would provide the carbon content if you could get the fire hot enough (The Japanese used rice stalks and charcoal to smelt the black sand that was used in the production of swords before they started trading for higher grade materials that were easier to work with). The main difficulty in getting the fire hot enough is forcing air through the fire, so it's really not all *that* difficult.

As far as the iron being too hard to work with a rock, it's not. The master I studied with did an amusing trick by making horse shoes using a glass coke bottle for a hammer. To make a basic hammer, all you need is to take a piece of steel (which you can make and mold, or even shape with the hammer head of the axe) that is rectangular and affix a handle to it.

Don't Lie

[CertGen]

I can't tell you how many times now I've interviewed some little fresh-out-of-school-all-eager-and-willing twat who has every language any one ever mentioned to him in school listed on his resume.

Don't lie about what you know.

If you cannot answer a simple question in a language you've listed on your resume then it shouldn't be there.

If you really think you need to bone up a lack luster resume with lists of useless abilities be smart about it. Make a grid and list the language and your current level of proficency. Then the interviewer isn't appalled when you're asked to answer a simple question in Perl but you can't remember how even declare a scalar in Perl because you only ever wrote one Perl script...

...five years ago...

...but really you just copied someone else's Perl CGI script and changed the HTML output to match your own amateur porn site's look and feel.

Worst interview ever! Ever!

[PylonHead]

I was working a job doing Windows apps in C++ by day, but what I really wanted to do was develop games. I had done some small scale stuff on my own, and I wanted a chance to do it professionally.

So I heard through the grapevine that a small computer consulting company I knew was looking to develop a game, and they were looking for a programmer. I decided I would try moonlighting on the game while keeping my day job. I showed up after hours, and was met by the top three people that ran the place.

I was ushered into a small dark office. They sat in a rough semicircle around me. After a brief introduction, they started firing difficult logic problems at me. For about an hour and a half. No paper, no time to myself, I was expected to work out the answer out loud. It was intimidating as hell.

But I'm good at that type of stuff, and although I needed a little prodding on one of the problems I eventually came up with the right answers. They seemed satisfied. I explained what sort of compensation I would require, they agreed, and we decided I would come in after hours the next day to get started.

So the next day rolls around, and I show up. I get setup on a machine, but clearly the president of the company wants to talk to me about something.

So he comes out and says it. "Well, I've talked to my associates, and we've decided we don't want to pay you. We're a little cash poor right now. So what we want you to do is create a prototype, and we'll market it, and cut you in for a percentage of the profit."

I was floored. They wanted to make all the decisions, while I did all the up front work, for the possibility of some of the profit later on. They wanted me to be their bitch.

If they had told me this up front, I would have walked out the door right then, but instead I had to sit through the most stressful interview of my life, fighting for their approval. Blech.

Quizzed in an invented language

[dmorin]

I was told once to expect a programming quiz. I got there and discovered that the quiz consisted of 20 questions about a completely imaginary language. Each page of the quiz would explain one rule of the language, then ask a question about it. The trick was that as you got farther in the test the knowledge from previous questions factored into the answers.

HR guy told me I had to get 18 out of 20 right or I was done. Then he said I had about 3 minutes per question, and walked out. I finished it, checked my answers, changed about 5 answers...and scored an 18. Turns out the 5 I changed were indeed wrong and I'd changed them to correct answers. Phew!

Most annoying part was when I asked the HR guy why I'd gotten the two wrong. He said he had no idea, he only knew the correct multiple choice letters, not any logic behind them. So being a geek I opened the book back up, rethought the two I'd missed, and came to the correct solution for both of them. Of course at that point he didn't care, but damnit I did.

Compare that with the job where I currently am. I was asked a programming question, I wrote some code, the interviewing manager told me that it was a good "brute force" answer. Well that bugged the crap outta me, so I thought about it all the way home, thought of a better answer, and emailed it to him with a note saying "It may be too late for this to matter but my head will explode if I don't send it." During the next round of interviews I told one of the engineers that story and he laughed and said, "Well, I know two people that did that exact thing, and both of them work here now." make that 3.

Gilligan's Island

[obtuse]

First - survival, but you might have one volatile asset to help with your rescue. Do you have a watch, and is it still running and on time? Do you know the date? If so, the sooner you take a reading of the angle of the sun & combine it with the time, the more accurately your position can be determined. Otherwise, start tracking the arc of a shadow & wait for the solstice, & take a readings then. Include these readings on the messages you toss into the sea. (Pumice, coconut husks?)

Make shoes - you won't live long if your feet give out. Any injury could kill you by way of infection. Make clothes from the cloth, and conserve it. It will deteriorate in the sun, but better it than your skin. If you can clothe yourself with feathers or anything else, you want to do that instead. Depending on how long you are on the island, you may need to make a sail from the cloth. It is also a source of fine thread. You might use it to skin a boat.

Make a prominent distress sign, visible from the air.

You can distill water from the hydrothermal vents, or at least use the heat to distill seawater.

Can you make a compass from the hematite or nails? If the hematite is specular hematite, it may be possible to polish it into a signalling mirror. Try the copper too.

With the copper & nails as a battery (voltaic pile) you could make a spark gap generator to produce radio noise. It's a little Gilligan's Island, but you could probably rig a machine (powered by wind, or gravity by way of ported water or sand) to use this to constantly transmit SOS. Depending on your ability to work the copper, you may be able to make enough wire to make a simple radio receiver & speaker. You may need to use your battery to magnetize pieces of nails.

If the wind is constant enough, you might make a kite to hoist an antenna.

Can the seeds be made edible after making into flour and treating with ashes or the acid from the berries? Acorns aren't edible either, but lot's of people have survived on them. Vary your diet to avoid scurvy, ricketts or worse.

How large is the lens? If it's a page sized fresnel lens, then you can melt concrete with those, so smelting small quantities of iron is not entirely implausible. A blind spot in the center of your vision won't improve your survival odds, so don't look at the hot spot. Hang the lens on a frame.

Prepare a signal fire, & keep coals ready to light it. Don't burn down your coconut trees.

Can the berries be fermented? Not just for entertainment, but alcohol can clean wounds, and could be useful for fuel.

Nothing gets thrown away or tossed into the sea. Make a latrine in a place that won't cause any trouble. Even your waste is a resource. Look out for birdlime. You might just be able to make a black powder flare for signalling from that, the sulfur & some charcoal. Burn as little as you must, as you don't have time to wait for fuel to grow. Besides, you've got free heat from the hydrothermal vents.

As others have said: Obsidian & flint: Knives, spear points. Coppper -fishhooks. You could probably work the nails too. Lots of other excellent suggestions here. With the copper & hematite, you should be able to make a diode, and from that a radio receiver. Good luck making a speaker or earphone. Homemade wire, nail fixed magnet, diaphragm of palm or cloth. Handy, but probably impossible: Triode amplifier.

Finally, use wax from the berries & feathers from the birds, & make wings. Fly away, but don't get too close to the sun, or the wax will melt and you'll fall into the sea, to the dismay of your father.

A related problem is how does one make accurate tools or measuring devices without already having them? One way to start is by making a flat surface by rubbing two things together.