this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
41 points (88.7% liked)

Experienced Devs

3978 readers
1 users here now

A community for discussion amongst professional software developers.

Posts should be relevant to those well into their careers.

For those looking to break into the industry, are hustling for their first job, or have just started their career and are looking for advice, check out:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
snowe@programming.dev
jmk1ng@programming.dev
drewsiferr@programming.dev
41
How to make a coding challenge to hire a new engineer? (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by hi65435@discuss.tchncs.de to c/experienced_devs@programming.dev
35 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] psybe@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I had to hire a whole sweet of devs in a pretty large organization. We didn’t do a code challenge, but curated some questions to ask in the interview to get a gauge on their knowledge. This worked well for us and all the devs we hired have been doing great! I think your dev team should be allowed to interview and ask technical questions that are relevant to the work they will be doing, the hire the ones you like from that.

[–] hi65435@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago

This sounds interesting. Actually my job before was also in a large org and while there was a coding part, it was very basic. (String splitting, joining, a design/modelling task and pair programming on the actual code with the team lead) That team was quite large and everybody contributed their part.

Anyway in the current company the actual day-to-day challenges are figuring out things in the Linux ecosystem and also getting things done.