We’re a very small team with little experience in hiring but got approval for a new engineer. Basically HR will look for people through the usual channels and I think we have a reasonably good job description. Unfortunately the coding challenge (a 30h+ take home) is atrociously difficult and doesn’t really reflect what we do. On the other hand I think the false positive rate would be low. FWIW it’s a Linux application and it might be difficult to only count on experience from the CV.

Any ideas how to build a good challenge from scratch and what time constraints are reasonable?

  • planetaryprotection@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    I was in pretty much the same position last year and had to do this. What I did ended up working well for us. For context, we build a somewhat complex web app and we were interviewing for a mid-level developer. Our product isn’t really anything special, pretty much a CRUD app with some more interesting/complex bits glued on.

    Basically I took a recent ticket out of our system and abstracted it out to something generic. My intention was to expose the candidate to what our tickets might be like - including some uncertainty. I was only shooting for a quick ~1 hour task, so nothing too in-depth and I was going to be in the zoom call with them to answer the questions that I expected them to have. I wanted something more collaborative than adversarial so I had them share their IDE window with me. Basically a short pair-programming session.

    I chose a ticket that was small and dealt with a system we use extensively in our product so I got to see whether they were able to grasp some of the core concepts we use in our product. I also deliberately left out some vital information that they would need to realize they needed and ask for. I wanted to see them think through the problem and see the missing piece. It was really a pretty easy task but the technical bits were enough to weed out inexperienced juniors and for the senior devs that got it done quickly, I was able to discuss some extensions and architectural bits.

    I wasn’t looking for a specific solution, I just wanted to see how they approached the problem and their solution to it.

    TL;DR: Choose a small ticket/task that you had to do recently, make it generic, and then watch the candidate reason through it//their solution.