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by frumper 1147 days ago
When you say make it up on the spot, I'm hearing they can answer questions when you ask. If you ask them to describe how they'd process input and send it to a database they can just as easily tell you what they generally do. If they don't mention any of the things you're looking for, then you have your answer. If they answer some then you can decide to probe about what's missing, or thank them for their time. You haven't explained why a take home test is needed for that.
1 comments
viraptor 1147 days ago
> When you say make it up on the spot, I'm hearing they can answer questions when you ask.

Or they have enough surface knowledge to risk an answer that could potentially work. It depends if that's the threshold acceptable to you.

> You haven't explained why a take home test is needed for that.

We're commenting on the blog post about this very question. Making the initial stage of this test take-home is at least partially solving points 2,5,6,8 from the list.

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frumper 1147 days ago
It sounds like we're now back to mind reading the answer you'd like them to provide based on overly broad questions. That is a poor way to assess whether they know about a topic. Ask them what you'd like to know. You don't have a relationship with them and they aren't familiar with your version of "normal" or "mature" processes.
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viraptor 1147 days ago
It doesn't matter if they're familiar with my specific concept of a mature app. (Although just reading the job description would cover 90% of it...) There's always going to be a lot of overlap of concepts anyway. The question was broad exactly because there are many good answers.

(FTR, the answers were pretty consistent in what elements they included, so it wasn't confusing for the candidates)

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