51–60 of 111 posts
I’ve used similar tests in interviews before (a function that behaves like atoi and candidates have to figure out what it’s doing) and the good candidates are able to go over the code and hold values in their head across multiple iterations of a loop.
There are many candidates who can’t do this.
What most interviews get wrong is that there are usually just a few "bullet points" that if you see them, you instantly know that the the candidate at least has the technical chops. Instead of creating a test that specifically aims for those bullet points, many technical assessments end up with convoluted scaffolding when actually, only those key bullet points really matter. Like the OP, I can usually tell if a candi…
I’d love for you to elaborate :) But along that thought, I’ve always held that a human conversation is the best filter. I’ll ask you what do you work on recently, what did you learn, what did you mess up, what did you hate about the tool / language / framework. I strongly believe your ability to articulate your situation corresponds with your ability to do the job.
For anyone who missed the (poorly-explained) trick, the website uses a CSS trick to insert an equals sign, thus showing different code if read or if copied/pasted. That's how the author knows whether you solved it in your head or pasted it somewhere.
Maybe the question could be flipped on its head to filter further with "50% of applicants get this question wrong -- why?" to where someone more inquisitive like you might inspect it, but that's probably more of a frontend question.
Why wouldn't a qualified developer just run the code? Takes two seconds instead of ... whatever you're going for here.
IMHO this is a dumb test
Best test is to listen to 2h meeting without too much details and have to figure out how to ship the feature.
better yet, listen to a 1h meeting and compare notes/action points
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an excellent point. I did not think of that.
Instead of the zero-width div, you could set up an event listener for the copy event (using addEventListener() method) which calls .clipboardData.setData() on the ClipboardEvent to change it to your modified code. That should avoid messing things up for people with screen readers while still trapping the copy+pasters.
I've had clipboard events and the clipboard API disabled in my browser to prevent websites from intercepting them for ages. I can't be the only one.
I got the right answer but it was so easy I went in with doubt I had done it right. Which I understand is my issue to work on, but if I were interviewing, I'd ask candidates to verbalize or write out their thought process to get a sense of who is overthinking or doubting themselves.
> I went in with doubt I had done it right. And if in your doubt you decided to run it through the interpreter to get the "real" answer, whoops, you're rejected.