Unfortunately, we'll reject most software developer job applications.

So according to this post, companies are only going to hire the top 0.5% of programmers to their entry-level positions. Something is seriously wrong with this employment model if 99.5% of the labour pool can expect to never find work.

Hyperbole aside, I think what they're saying is that the vast majority of people who apply are, in fact, not actually software developers.

Perhaps they are looking for some kind of job, and because they know how to type, that must mean they can code. Since coding is just typing, right? (how many of us had bosses at one time that thought this!)

If you can't answer those 5 questions, then I would wager you've never actually written an OO program, you've never attended a single undergrad COSI course, or you don't speak English.

I think it's hard to give answers that are both accurate and concise to some of these questions, without appending "in language ______" to them. In some languages, access control is a compiler feature and is actually strictly enforced. Objective-C has access control for instance variables, but not for messages, and the ivar access control can be circumvented via the runtime (to say nothing of -valueForKey:). "Private" messages are typically declared in the implementation file or a second header. Python sort of has private methods through name mangling, but they aren't really private, since we're all adults. In Ruby, those words mean something fairly different.

It's worth noting that answers, particularly if you expect accurate ones, would be different depending on the language being considered. For example, private in Ruby is similar to protected in Java. But pedantry aside, those are fair questions for programmers.

It's just a publicity stunt. Some of their questions do not have answers that are both clear and concise because the language specifications themselves are not both clear and concise (in some cases they're neither). It's a classic example of people trying to make themselves look/feel smart by demanding that others' off-the-cuff answers meet a higher standard that their own researched-at-leisure questions. The proof lies in the fact that the answers are language-specific but "SuperCoders" apparently can't meet their own "accurate, clear and concise" standard in identifying that context.