You want to hire people smarter than you. If they are, they can ask better questions. Let them.

Never again do I want to work for someone so completely inept at coding and managing a project, but so good at talking a good game.

I don’t do well at impromptu coding on a white board and solving any non-trivial problem in less than a few minutes. I *can* solve most problems by thinking about them a little while, trying different things, googling to get ideas (or to just reuse well designed and tested code) – but I have to sit down to a computer, use an IDE and work at it.

The chance that an interviewer will ask me a question that I can solve easily on a whiteboard in just a minute or two while under the stress of an interview, is nill. I view such challenges as more of a passage of rite by the interviewer – they had to do it, and they’ll be damned if they let you get by without having to do it too. The idea that they have the insight to be able to see how you solve a problem from such a test is pure hubris at best.

Ask me for some code samples, I will be glad to share them and discuss them. Ask me, during an interview, to write code on a whiteboard for a problem I haven’t thought about and I will probably choke on it.

Programming means making decisions every day that will create or deny options for the company to grow later on. Even lowly grunts in an IT department can make choices that, months or years later, can make it possible for the company to take advantage of a new business opportunity, or make it impossible because the re-write would cause them to miss the opportunity and pass it to a competitor instead.

Decisions as seemingly trivial as “do I use MD5 or SHA?”

Computer programs are not products, they’re like shims and kleenex. Programs are a disposable artifact on the way to delivering the programmer’s knowledge of the problem and how to solve it. The doctor is the product, not the bandage. A business that has programmers have an asset, but it’s not the software. The software is a liability.

This applies even to commercial software, which you buy as if it were like a product. But with the exception of games, software stops being useful after only a few years, sometimes even a few months. It has to be rewritten, not just to support new operating systems and hardware but because the problem changes or our understanding of the problem changes.

And this is why programming isn’t a trade. Businesses who think it is and try to treat programmers as tradesmen do so at their own peril. If a company is using programmers for anything significant to the business at all, then the programmers will be co-inventing that business with them.

Some companies don’t realize this, and they don’t screen and interview their programmers properly. They set themselves up for a lot of problems when they do that, and not just when they get a “blub” who doesn’t want to learn anything sharper than Visual Basic or PHP. They will get programmers who don’t understand the company and what it needs, and they carry that company–invisibly, and silently–into the gutters with every line of code they write.

I’ve worked in all sorts of companies large and small, and very few take the attitude that “programmers become partners”. Many pay lip service to that idea, but few execute and continue to hold to those principals. The ones that do tend to not just single out programmers, but have that philosophy pervade the company at all levels (which is nice).

For many people, too, programming is a trade. It’s a skill they have, the come to work, provide the service, and go home at the end of the day, nothing more. Personality-wise, it’s hard for me to be like that, but I’m growing to accept it in others, especially depending on the work environment.

Yes, in some rarified exceptions – the googles and apples and microsofts and such, a programming position with one of them can catapult your career in to a different stratosphere, much like (I’d think) attending a private school may put you in a rather unique world that few have access to (the contacts alone are what make many situations valuable long after you’ve left).

Few companies treat their programmers as ‘partners’ when it comes to making stategic decisions, for example. Yet those same strategic decisions will have a direct impact on the programmer, both in his/her direct duties, but often long-term as a deciding factor as to whether they still have a job or not (layoffs, company folding, etc).

The world of ‘programming’ is far too broad for blanket statements like “It’s not a trade”. And certainly the “you do not seem to understand programming” comment is in poor taste.

Tests can be an effective way to help screen some candidates, but the use of tests, and what kinds of tests, seems to vary just about as much as the people doing the hiring and interviewing. Just as each interviewee is unique, each interviewer is also unique, and the needs of both should be served during the process. If someone is insulted by *any* testing procedure, I might have some reservations about that person. On the flip side, I’ve been insulted by some of the tests I’ve been asked to do, mostly because it indicated the position was not what was advertised, or the imposition on my time was *far* too great for the potential payout. Not ever job interview is with Google or Pixar, and the people hiring need to have a realistic view of their own company and the value proposition they’re offering as well.

Above IT there are software development firms, who should probably sit the candidate down in front of a workstation with a copy of the shop’s chosen compiler and ask them to create a basic “Address Book” or similar, which ought to take an hour or two.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM and others of that league will take a day or two of your time. If you pass, you’ve won the lottery. Congratulations. But it won’t be cheap to play.

Mr. Savage, when you’re offered the brass ring, I think you will prostrate yourself. I’m certain of it. If Pixar asked you apply for the Renderman team, I think I’d see you devote an 80-hour week to their test–even if they just asked you for Quicksort. Because the payoff is *that big*.

You do not seem to understand programming. It’s not a trade. Regardless of the language or platform, programmers become partners of the companies they work for, even if they don’t get stock options.

5 hours of coding to complete an interesting test may very well be the best time investment a candidate can make if his or her objective is to get a good job with competent colleagues. What you can do, if you’re unsure whether it’s worth it or not, is simply to call the recruiter and gently ask how many candidates that return their test actually get hired. Anything over 5% and, granted, you’re wasting your time.

That’s like asking for free work

Anything that would take over an hour is just ridiculous

Our test is designed to be simple; it should take an experienced programmer no more than 30-45 minutes to write a good solution, but it has room for ’showing off’. We’ve had candidates spent half a day and delivering it with design documentation, unit tests and api documentation, but that’s up to them.

It is also designed to not only show common coding techniques, but also analytical and interpretational skills.

How the test is used in the recruiting process is different in some of our countries. In NL for example, it’s only after the first interview that we ask someone to take the test. In the UK, where we get many more CVs, we’ve moved the test in front of the first interview. In all of the cases however they are used as a preparation for the technical interview, where we discuss a candidate’s solution, why he made certain decisions, how he got to solving it in a particular way etc.

If a candidate doesn’t want to invest a bit of his time to do the test, that’s fine with us. However since we do invest in the time to get to know you (it takes us longer to analyse your code than it takes you to write it) and to make sure that there’s a good fit, we think it’s fair to ask a candidate to write a bit of code. Candidates that shop their CV at 15 different companies are not interesting to us. We want to see them as more than ‘just another developer’ only if they are willing to see us as more than ‘just another employer’.

Finally, the plumber example is very unsuitable. Neither is plumbing anywhere close to resembling coding, the terms of engagements are much different. If I were to go into a long term contract with a restaurant to supply us with lunch and diner, I definitely want to have eaten their food before I’d even consider it.

Ain’t that the truth. I’ll never forget asking a credentialed co-worker once what he knew about the STL — I was looking for some quick guidance — and getting the reply, “Nothing, my professor wasn’t really into C++”. He had been out of school for a few years at that point.

It wasn’t the “nothing” that flabbergasted me, but the reason given. “Did you stop learning when you got your degree?” I didn’t say.

You can ask them questions about code and technology all day. But we don’t discuss code all day in the real world, instead they need to understand the business & technological problems presented to them, design and implement the solution. Our test is not solely focused on PHP either, we ask networking and database questions too.

We would never ask for a complete application or even class/script. The most they need to do for any given question is about five lines of code. Usually a few possible answers but the question will be laced with hints as to problem they’re trying to solve. We even allow access to the PHP manual, after all they’ll have it under normal conditions.

To answer anon’s question about degrees, they are to be treated with caution. One guy had a better BSc grade than I did yet had no concept of a mutex. Point is you probe at what you expect them to know rather than make an assumption.

Joel Spolsky argues for this kind of thing as a quick & cheap way of verifying that nuts-and-bolts programming is second-nature for a candidate. Any qualified programmer, he says, should be able to produce that function about as quickly as it takes to write it down. Someone who has to think about it at all is probably not the best candidate.

I suppose an ideal example wouldn’t replicate a built-in function, but in general the concept seems reasonable: ask for something stupidly simple just to make sure the person really “has” the language. It’s a quick filter, nothing more.

re:zce – I think the zend *framework* cert is probably more like what you’re thinking. The standard ZCE isn’t about ‘coding standards’ specifically.