this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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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
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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?

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[–] 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.