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"Y'all wanted good documentation, no?"
And that's why we're moving away from coding games where I work. Bad people try to cheat, good people can panic and shit the bed.
When I do interviews, I'm more interested in the candidate's relevant experience, what kind of issues they faced, how they were solved, if they think they could have done things differently, and how they think. Code itself is irrelevant unless I can review a sprint's worth of PRs.
When I ask more technical questions, I never ask for code but for an explanation on how they would tackle the problem. For example, I often ask about finding a simple solution to get all data relevant to a certain date in two, simple, historized tables. If you know window functions, it's trivial. If you don't, your solution will be slow and dirty and painful. But as most devs don't know about window functions anyway, it lets me see how they approach the issue and if they understand what parts should have a trivial solution to make it simple.
Oh geez, I'm one of those people who can't code on paper. I was applying for something ages ago and I went in for a programming test and they handed me a paper test and my mind completely shut down. Put me in front a computer and I have no issues at all... It was embarrassing.
I would just write down the steps I would take, just some psudocode. It doesn't have to work, it just has to make sense in the style of the language you're talking about.
import random library
import any GUI/display libraries required for the outcome desired
build array of integers [1..52] (or 0..51 if you're being fancy)
for loop 1..1000
select random number A 1..52 (or 0..51 if you used that above)
select random number B 1..52 (or 0..51 if you used that above)
swap elements in the array A and B
pop first two elements from array
decode at display time what the two numbers represent in terms of playing cards
If the test requires more than that, then they're crazy. The syntax doesn't matter, just that you can logic yourself through the problem.
You can use the IDE, google, or whatever to fill in the specifics. If you wanted me to do that in literally any programming language, once the psudocode is done, you just spend an hour or so looking up the details.
Even the odd numbers stuff? I think interviewers account for nerves and being outside an IDE. You might draw a blank but would you be would be randomly adding things like these did?
for some reason I still needed to know programming on paper so much so that at the university, in class prgramming we had to do the exam on paper. every time. no matter if it was Java or C++...
I strangely enjoyed it, but it still was kinda weird.
I don't believe these are genuine interview answers.
They do seem to be a bit absurd. I had a nice chuckle though.
I hope not...
Want to print out all odd numbers from 1 to 100? Easy:
for(_=[];_<+!![]+""+[]*[]+[]*[];_++)(_%+(!![]+!![])?console.log(_):[]);
Actually, I prefer this one:
for(_=[];_<+!![]+""+[]*[]+[]*[];_++%+(!![]+!![])?[]:console.log(_));
Or this one without the "undefined" when run in a browser console:
for(_=[];_<+!![]+""+[]*[]+[]*[]-!![]-!![];_++%+(!![]+!![])?[]:console.log(_));_+!![]
I knew a dude who got a job for a programming language he never wrote. Not only that, the guy was hired to be the experienced / lead programmer to give guidance on how to use the language. In fact, I knew multiple people like this. Some were actual programmers and good at other programming languages, but some had decided it was time to switch from another field (geology, marketing, database engineer, ...).
It's still puzzling how they got their jobs.
Sometimes, aptitude and an ability to learn and grow is more valuable than having specific technology knowledge. It suggests a more generalist take on one's career, which means they are always going to be useful. There's also something to be said for "soft skills" and a person's overall attitude. All this can make the balance for a lack of technical experience, provided they have demonstrated talent an ability to close such gaps.
Other times, the whole hiring process is just completely broken. Your friend may have had to contend with co-workers that were utterly incapable at their jobs.
I used to work at a company that used XSLT. They know that it's an obscure language that probably none of the potential candidates have ever worked with. But it's easy enough to learn the basics in an hour or two.
So the entry test was to strip some tags from an XML file. You had a day or two (maybe more) to do it. My solution wasn't ideal, I didn't use several of the shortcuts available in the language. But at least it did what it was supposed to.
A few weeks after I had started working there my boss came up to me, visibly frustrated and asked me whether the test was too hard. Thinking back on my problems I replied that maybe having the desired output ready so that you could test your own solution against it might be nice. But my boss's problem was that none of the last 5 candidates could even send in a solution that would run.
You had so much time, and running an XSLT script is really easy and takes no time at all. And for some inane reason these people couldn't even manage to test their code and still decided to send it in.
And I thought I was an idiot when I didn't know if it was spelled grey or gray in CSS during the in-person interview.
You had a day or two [...] none of the last 5 candidates could even send in a solution that would run.
As harsh as this sounds, this test was doing its job. Assuming you're not hiring junior candidates, that is.
One day is enough to research XSLT enough to get the gist, and two is enough for a polished solution. And since we're just stripping tags, we're really just selecting for all the inner text, which is weird but not hard to do with the right selector expression. The task also selects for people that understand XML processing as programmatically manipulating a DOM, which is crucial to wrapping your head around more advanced tasks.
XSL is like that, I guess.
Some shit still use XSL at my workplace, and once I got a task with them, so... I hit up some online resources and fixed the issue.
I kid you not, from there on, I was (and still am) the XSL guy and gave me more XSL designing and work.
I mean, it's not hard, a tiny little bit complex, but I really just spent half hour researching and some googling during work to complete these tasks, it in its own way makes sense.
But they just... aren't willing to maintain those XSLs, because they indeed looks really ugly and scary in a way.
I would prefer your kind of test a hundred times over the one on top here.
That said, why would they expect you to know the css color values by heart? I see no usecase for that.
It just came up in a discussion. The test was to spot mistakes in some HTML code. I marked the "gray". The guy I did it with said that that's not a mistake. At least he thinks it's not. We were musing about that for a minute and later found out that I was wrong. Nothing major. I just felt stupid about it.
I felt especially stupid because he seemed to be rather important. While everyone's e-mail address was [email protected] his was [email protected].
But he was just a nice guy and apparently I did well and got my rather high salary approved.
I would just use #888888 anyway, but which way is it spelled, out of interest?
GrAy for Americans and grEy for Europeans. I used to basically flip a coin but I read that mnemonic once and have never forgotten since.
referrer, meet referer.
probably the easiest way to spot someone that's spent a decent amount of time messing with HTTP/1.x headers.
Both work typically
Gray, the 'murican way.
I wanted to answer "grey", full of confidence. Then I decided to look it up to be sure and found out that it's "gray".
The test was to spot mistakes in a simple html file. So I couldn't substitute anything. And my favourite gray color is #666.
It is very good test for the ability to research, I think. The amount of people who painstakingly went through some video tutorial on PHP and are now developers is insane. I'm sure there's place in the market for them (writing Wordpress themes/plugins, for example), but it's hard to find a programmer with ability to think these days. Not because people are more stupid, but because every other person is a programmer now.
I hope these aren't real. I, and most people here, could probably write these codes top to bottom on paper without an eraser or strikethrough parts because we have it fully solved before the interviewer finished the sentence.
I mean, it's a hard problem to solve if you never worked with moduli before.
Shouldn't people familiar with integer arithmetic should be able to struggle to something like x == 2 * (x/2) to test if it is odd or even? Or just bitwise x & 1?
Is it? I would expect someone to come up with either toggling a variable back and forth for even/odd, or counting by 2s, heck, treat it as a floating point, divide by two, and search the string representation for a period or something!
Sure, programming is hard if you've never worked with programming language features before... Modulus isn't some obscure esoteric operator, it's literally CS 101
I feel fortunate that the image is fried and I can't read it.
If your client has an HD picture button (like Boost) you need to click it to actually receive the proper image