When we hire, after a few phone interviews we give the programmer an in person coding exercise that is very basic. Open a file and parse data, etc... They can use the internet. It's very basic. 80% of the candidates cannot do that. I'm not exaggerating. Maybe I'm missing something here, but it's pretty astonishing to me.
Do you require them to do it in a specific language or let them choose which one they are most comfortable with? How do you decide which programmers to bring onsite? Have you considered giving them different options in the from of doing a take home test or coming in and coding inperson instead?
We require a specific language... the language we use for the job. The phone interview asks technical questions, a few design questions, and some personality geared questions. The technical questions are basic and cover some of the basic concepts of the language and basics of OO.
We haven't considered doing a take home test for 2 reasons. 1) We want to see how well the person can get around windows/keyboard. I believe this is important. 2) What we are asking to code is very basic. If we sent something home it would have to be harder.
Are you thinking that the in-person coding would make them nervous? I ask because we are clearly doing something wrong if it's hard to find candidates that can do basic programming. Even if the person is entry level, that would be fine as long as they are an A player at the entry level... if that makes any sense.
Valid points as far as the language goes, but I'm not sure I agree with your points about workflow... the primary goal should be to see if they can reach the solution using the tools required for the job over how the tools are used in my opinion, and how much guidance they require to do so. I am thinking that the in-person coding might make them nervous. As a personal example for my specific line of work coding is more of a secondary requirement over having knowledge of how systems work, and despite having contributed code to some widely used open source projects and having enough knowledge to get by given language given enough documentation, I would likely freeze up in an interview if asked to code.
If I were you I would look for candidates that actually have some projects they can showcase that proves they know how to code, and offer them the chance to either do an easier in-person test or a take-home project. During the job search I personally jumped at the chance to do take-home projects since I view them as learning experiences, but for more experienced people I can see them being viewed as tedious. Most truly passionate entry level programmers looking for their first job and some direction I hope would jump at that chance to get some more directed experience as well.
That does not surprise me -- many web developers only do web development. They use frameworks for database access, and rarely, if ever, do direct file access. And parsing data? There are libraries for that, right?
Sure, you would think that would be a trivial task for a professional coder. But it is amazing how much you can accomplish without ever having to do anything other than model some data, write some business logic and security around it, and build a front end. Frameworks FTW. The downside is that they don't know how to code without the frameworks.
I don't doubt what you're saying, but in my opinion, if you can't write code outside of your chosen framework... you can't write code. It would be like calling yourself a mathematician because you passed 8th grade algebra. You learned some math tools, but you didn't learn math. (Not you specifically of course, the hypothetical "you")
Parsing data is a very low barrier to entry. Likewise, a person that can write an ORM data model without understanding the basics of a database is a disaster waiting to happen. If you don't understand the primitives you're working with, you're hopeless when the abstractions you use inevitably break down.
