How many times has an interviewer — either for an actual employer or for a recruiting agency — asked you: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate yourself at $insert_skill_here?” If you ask candidates to rate their own skill levels — on any scale; it doesn’t matter if it’s 1-5, 1-10, or “beginner, intermediate, […]
Tag Archives: interviews
What’s Wrong With the “Minimal Weighings” Puzzle for Front-End Interviews
Thursday, October 29th, 2015 – 6:24 pm
A while back, I came across a post by Philip Walton, who points out that most front-end interview questions aren’t well suited for their basic task of… well, testing a candidate’s front-end development knowledge. At least, the sorts of things he ran into were mostly “logical puzzles, generic coding challenges, and algorithm design problems”, as […]
Good Things About FizzBuzz
Wednesday, February 29th, 2012 – 6:08 pm
Over a year ago, I mentioned FizzBuzz as a basic competence screen during interviews. At the time, I said: “My only real quarrel with FizzBuzz is that, at this point, any developer worth their salt is familiar with it.” I seem to have been wrong, becuase I keep running into coders who definitely are competent, […]
Why I Don’t Mind Coding Tests
Sunday, August 15th, 2010 – 10:43 am
I keep hearing about developers who, when interviewing for potential jobs, consider coding tests to be “a waste of time”, “insulting”, or “beneath me”. The logic seems to be: Once you’ve risen to the level of Senior Developer (or some similar title), people should realize that yes, you really do know how to write simple […]