[Gratsby]

At my work we recently needed to hire a developer. We gave them all a very basic problem to solve and told them "use any language, use any libraries". The idea was to get a feel for their coding style - do they comment their code, is their logic something the rest of the team could follow, will they address unmentioned issues, will they press for clearer requirements, etc.

A few notable solutions: 1) The C guy. Damn if he didn't blow that problem out of the water. I never want to be responsible for anything he coded. Entirely too complex, no comments, lord knows what side effects he put in place.

2) The java girl. Didn't finish. Didn't do any logging. Very logical separation of code. Lots of comments. Had to continually reference a text file in order to run the command to show output.

3) The .net guy who attacked the problem with Python. Imported a handful of libraries. Wrote 14 or 16 lines of code. Completely baffled that we would provide such an easy problem. When asked why he didn't use his strongest language, he laughed.

One of them got hired and won't have to write a single line of .net anything for a very long time.

[normac]

One of my favorite pieces of code I've written is a 150 line Python script I made to solve a really ugly text processing problem. I have tried to use it as a code sample when talking to potential employers, but it backfires because it makes the original problem look so simple that they wonder why I bothered to send it.

[gknoy]

If it's any consolation, Peter Norvig's Sudoku solver seems so readable on the surface that I've fallen into the trap of thinking it looks easy, or that I fully get it. :)

0: http://norvig.com/sudoku.html

[shiftb]

Maybe you should try a reverse interview process. Send them the original problem, ask them to have one of their top developers solve it, and then compare solutions.

[agumonkey]

Is this a real thing ?

[csense]

It should be.

[TylerE]

I once wrote a custom report generator that could pair basically arbitrary input formats (pluggable, I think by the time I was done I'd written importers for CSV, fixed width, and JSON data) and output custom PDF output, with fully-user definable formatting/elements - using XML "templates" just because I didn't want to write a custom parser. Included loops, if statements, etc, and some pretty fancy output features (e.g. output N records per page, with custom sorting, headers/footers/etc). Used ReportLab for the PDF generation. Whole thing was under 1k lines of Python 2.