Experienced Devs

4011 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:

Logo base by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

snowe

jmk1ng

drewsiferr

How to make a coding challenge to hire a new engineer? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/experienced_devs

29 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

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago

Short answer: don't. Ask questions that demonstrate familiarity with concepts that you and your team encounter in a regular basis.

If you insist on a coding challenge, give them an old but difficult problem your team encountered in the job and assess how they would solve it.