Programming task for a job interview
Hi everyone,
I'm interviewing students for a co-op position here on Tuesday and I need a programming task that they can do as part of the interview. It should be something fairly short that they could complete in about 30 minutes. One of the problems I have now is that I haven't seen resume's yet (! I know ! It's just how the system works at this stage which I won't go into).
The students will be from the CS or engineering faculties so I can expect them to have a fairly strong understanding of programming principles. However, I don't know right now what languages they would know already and that would vary depending on which program they're in. Learning to work with different languages is part of the job so that could be part of the interview task.
Any ideas?
pr0gr4mm3r posted this at 21:35 — 1st November 2007.
He has: 1,502 posts
Joined: Sep 2006
"Write an operating system. Go."
Ok...for real then. Here are a couple of ideas.
Abhishek Reddy posted this at 10:42 — 2nd November 2007.
He has: 3,348 posts
Joined: Jul 2001
99 bottles of beer is a good basic problem. There are some more challenging ones published by ITA software that they use in interviews. Also, Project Euler is a good source of problems.
There have been a few good articles and posts linked on programming.reddit.com about interviews. Here are some that I remember:
Interviewing and Hiring programmers
Thirteen Patterns Of Programmer Interviews
the power of code samples in interviewing
kaykays posted this at 10:51 — 3rd November 2007.
He has: 17 posts
Joined: Oct 2007
IMHO, thirty minutes seems to be very little time to conduct a programming
test. For screening programmers, I generally favour using a aptitude test
comprising of a number of small questions (say 20 questions in 20 minutes)
of varying degrees of complexity and covering logic, maths, etc. The
questions are not very complex, but by imposing a time constraint, it
requires a fast thinker to do well.
Megan posted this at 16:30 — 3rd November 2007.
She has: 11,421 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
Thanks a lot for your help. Abhi - those links are great, I'll look at them on Monday.
I got a chance to see the applicants' resumes on Friday. Two know php and one javascript. It does put them at a bit of an advantage. The problem solving skills is what I"m really tring to get at here.
Megan
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Megan posted this at 16:48 — 5th November 2007.
She has: 11,421 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
So, any other ideas for a programming tasks? interviews are tomorrow morning. The students I have are pretty inexperienced - all in their first year of university, some have a little experience outside of that. I need something pretty simple that involves some problem solving...
Megan
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