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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 [email protected] to c/experienced_devs

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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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[–] [email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 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.