A hiring test I'd like to run

A hiring test I'd like to run
shkspr.mobi

And anyone who does go for the help gets an immediate offer.

I hate people too stubborn to admit they don't know.

It's also worth noting that people don't like "proxy tests" for the skills they'll need to use on the job. If the test only tangentially assesses a skill then it's going to be influenced by other skills or flaws and won't give an interviewer a good idea of how good you are at something. This is why people complain about whiteboard exercises in developer hiring. Unless remembering and explaining an algorithm on a board is something you'll actually be doing in the role then it's not a good test - it sort of assesses how good you are at explaining an algorithm, but it really assesses memory, presentation skills, etc. Someone with brilliant whiteboard skills isn't necessarily a good developer, so hiring them on because you were impressed by how well they explained something in front of a board feels wrong, especially to people who aren't good at the tangential stuff.

In the case of the suggested hiring test in the article, it doesn't test someone's job skills. It tests how well they look for help, but it also tests how well someone copes in unfamiliar applications, or with esoteric UIs (in the case of Blender), or if they've actually used the app that's being used as a proxy. None of those things are necessarily a good assessment of whether the person can do the role they're applying for, so the test fails.

The job was fullstack node and react, I went in and they said we want you to look at this game written in Python which is really slow and tell us what is wrong with it (I hadn't done python in years and back then wasn't very good at it). We will sit with you. I said I was game, they said lots of people weren't - one guy evidently got offended and said he didn't do that language (I can definitely think of one friend of mine who is totally competent who would get offended at being asked to work in a language that did not have anything to do with the job he was applying for)

The game was using a big dictionary in an array and you had to look up words from it and it was slow (about 7 minutes to do searches). So I thought to myself, damn I cannot remember the name of that algorithm for this (binary search), ok let's stall a bit maybe I will remember the algorithm name.

So what's the first thing you would do?

Uhm how about checking a profiler. So we checked and found some simple things we could optimize. And then I looked through the code and I saw there were parts I could cache etc.

So after all those things were done the time to do a search was a little bit more than halved and I still couldn't remember "binary search", so I stared dumbfounded at the screen for I think about a 3-4 seconds and I started to say "uhm" and then the guy sitting with me I guess ran out of the time he wanted to spend and said "ok well there is an algorithm for this blah blah blah" showed how to do it in python. Thanks for your time.

I actually didn't want the job but still felt somewhat let down that I couldn't remember.