| I'd say you'd need to qualify what you mean by "difficult". That is, the exercise in itself is not too complex. As described by the API specification, the operations are acceptably simple and well defined. So for someone with some experience, it's probably an easy problem. However there is a lot that is implicit and assumed, and that can take quite more effort and time, particularly for a Junior dev - which is what you've ranked the difficulty at. The main problem is the infrastructure. The candidate is expected to create not only the service asked, but also setting up a bunch of things just to be able to build and run it. Maybe some of that is helped with the mentioned "Guided local testing instructions" but it doesn't sound like it is. As mentioned on "Why Microservices as coding tests" [0]: "Building a Microservice from scratch involves a ton of different skills, and so it gives us a complete overview of developers' abilities." However, many of the skills mentioned there can't be really expected from a Junior dev. And that is a problem because if they don't have those more advanced skills they just won't be able to show the basic skills they do have. In my experience, for Junior devs it works much better if you provide them with at least some infrastructure and let them focus on a specific part of the problem. Notice also, that the answers you get from comments here, would probably need to be qualified by the commenter's experience. [0] https://codigrade.com/index.html#whymicroservice |
We will try to improve the messaging about the infrastructure components, and probably update the difficulty!