Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Are Timed Coding Tests Valuable?
First time accepted submitter xkrebstarx writes "A buddy of mine recently applied to a large tech company. Before setting up a phone interview with him, the unnamed company issued a timed coding test to gauge his coding prowess. He was allotted 45 minutes to complete an undergraduate level coding assignment. I would like to ask the Slashdotters of the world if they find value in these speed-programming tests. Does coding quickly really indicate a better programmer? A better employee?"
The basic rule of programming interviews is that you should demand that they actually program. It doesn't necessarily have to be a difficult problem: I've handed somebody a standard Fizzbuzz in an interview, and the competent candidates will solve it in 2-5 minutes, while the incompetent candidates won't solve it in 15 minutes.
The reason this is necessary is that on paper, the incompetent candidates can look identical to the competent candidates.
I am officially gone from
I took one of these during an interview. They put me in a room w/ a computer my IDE of choice and had me do a project. The general gist was to build a program that read instructions from a file, parsed them, carried them out, then output the result at the end. The instructions all had to do with string manipulation. After I finished, they brought my code up on a projector and had four or five developers do a sort of code review, asking me why I chose to do various things in certain ways. So, not only did they test whether I could finish the project successfully, they got to see whether I can speak intelligently about design decisions and handle constructive criticism from other developers. Seemed like an extremely valuable exercise.