There's also an interesting tool that's open source in case you don't want to pay for Interview Street called WebCat used by some universities to run automated test cases. Not all software can be automatically tested (and in the case of WebCat, I think there are only plugins for C++ and Java at the moment).
Interview Street (YC S11) streamlines the search for great programmers
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Re: Interview Street (YC S11) streamlines the search for great programmers
#32I submitted the same Java code 3 times. Compiled ok only on the third time since I poked around a bit and found I have to call my class "Solution" in order to pass compilation! The guy in the live chat said he'll change my # of submissions to 1 instead of 3, since the challenge didn't say that the class be called "Solution". Hasn't done so yet. My score is 52.5 when it should really be 57.5. Hopefully they fix that.…
Done now!
Re: Interview Street (YC S11) streamlines the search for great programmers
#33I get frustrated because I am pretty horrible (in my mind) at these kind of math puzzles ("Given N numbers , [N 0 and K Your company is a web app, I can write web apps; why am I solving problem sets from undergrad Discrete Math to demonstrate competence? Why not have the tasks be like "Use AJAX to pull down a users last 10 tweets and display them on a web page"? Maybe it's because the only samples are generic and not…
Agreed. But more, is there any evidence that these types of technical tests actually select for better employees?
Re: Interview Street (YC S11) streamlines the search for great programmers
#34What? No Lisp option?
The question would be, which LISP? We have too many to choose from :)
Clojure, however, is coming soon.
Re: Interview Street (YC S11) streamlines the search for great programmers
#35The only thing a site like this can "streamline" is the weeding out of the truly incompetent people, pretending to be programmers. But I'd argue that it's not a very hard task anyway.
So, while solving the challenges will be fun for the applicants, it doesn't seem like the service would be of much help to the companies.
Re: Interview Street (YC S11) streamlines the search for great programmers
#36Re: Interview Street (YC S11) streamlines the search for great programmers
#37In case people didn't know this, this is based all out of India. And we have Yuvi Panda (HN:yuvipanda), one of the younger hackers around here, joining them. Can't wait to see how they do.
Re: Interview Street (YC S11) streamlines the search for great programmers
#38In case people didn't know this, this is based all out of India. And we have Yuvi Panda (HN:yuvipanda), one of the younger hackers around here, joining them. Can't wait to see how they do.
We just moved to valley :)
Re: Interview Street (YC S11) streamlines the search for great programmers
#39For the sake of comparison, there is a site with a similar aim that was mentioned here earlier. http://www.codeeval.com/
Re: Interview Street (YC S11) streamlines the search for great programmers
#40A feature suggestion from me:
- Allow the recruiter to decide what he's looking for in the code. e.g. Complexity / Efficiency / Clean maintainable code / OO Principles, etc.
The biggest problem I have with job interview style 'coding puzzles' - is that the code that is optimum to solving the solution is actually not code I would want to write day to day and wouldn't be code I would want to work with day to day.
The reason is because in my line of work, we are working with good clean, maintainable code, using good OO principles. This includes naming of variables, naming of functions and accounting for extendibility and maintainability from the ground up.
However, most of these coding puzzles, will be looking for people to write the 'simplest' / 'most elegant' solution to the problem, often leaning towards efficiency or using the least number of lines / characters.
For example, the variables will be 'x', 'y', 'a', 'b', everything will be manipulated through integer 'index' and complex reg exp's may often feature as short cuts to longer code.
- Now there's nothing wrong with the solution this produces. However, overall coding style I prefer is maintainable and easily readable. Variable names have meaning, we work with concrete objects and each piece of complexity is broken into separate functions / classes.
Neither solution is wrong, but the approach to either is completely different and for a interviewee it's often hard to know which path I should be treading when writing the sample code.
On the one hand, the interviewer may think I lack any forethought of maintainability / readability, if I just hack together something quickly using single character variables.
On the other hand, the interviewer may think I'm adding too much bloat / taking too long by using full naming and creating my objects to handle what I want to achieve.