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by ajeet_dhaliwal
3033 days ago
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70 or 80 percent of candidates who say on their CV that they can code, and have convinced a recruiter that they can code, can't write a class and a couple of functions. Any other hiring managers here see this? It just seems hard to believe. Are you sure it's not the case that they can code just fine but just can't balance a red black tree in 5 minutes in a language that was never mentioned as a requirement before while a stop watch is shoved in their face while also having to jump through rings of fire to the background noise of some people sighing disapprovingly. |
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When we've put out the call for Senior Developers experienced with language X (pick any: C#, Javascript, Objective-C), we get people who can't even write a basic hello-world statement being sent through by recruiters.
Years ago we built a basic coding test which is effectively "Here's a class, now modify it according to these sets of requirements" - something that anyone modestly competent in those languages can do in 20 minutes at most. We deliberately avoided writing trick questions, and tried to write it in clear basic language to avoid any issues with language barriers.
Applicants are asked to either do it at home, or if they don't have the ability to do so, they can come into our offices and sit in a meeting room with a laptop to complete it.
Keep in mind, this is for people who've already submitted a CV (directly, or through a recruiter) and report they have years of experience with these languages.
We've had people write back saying that it was too difficult, others who submit complete garbage that not only doesn't compile/run, but doesn't even have vaguely correct syntax for the language.
We had someone who took up the offer to do it in our offices, who we had to kick out after they sat there from about lunchtime until we were closing the offices at 7pm, and all they had done was copy down our model class from the questionnaire (incorrectly) and write some comments about how they might implement it.
I thought that it kind of overstating of skill was limited to just development roles, but having seen the quality of the people applying for Senior-level roles as DBAs, Sysadmins, BI folks - it's all terrible.