We didn't really. They, respectively, didn't finish the entire test, over-engineered a few of the other questions and failed the comprehension test (we test the ability to understand requirements as well).
The thing is clearly marked "pragmatic solutions" rather than most interesting as well.
>>1 person wrote a proper state machine driven parser that worked.
Look, the fact is, based on the replies below, this guy is probably better off working somewhere else.
Not to go off on this particular person, the preoccupation with "Library Knowledge(tm)" in the enterprise (so, Java) world has become an epidemic. I have seen libraries used for all the wrong reasons, pulling in great gobs of someone elses code to do a bloody string copy!
Damn, you are hiring coders. Let them fricken code, for God's sake.
Please, I know all of the counter arguments (I've been harangued by them for years), but I really think that there is a middle ground here. Some things are truly worth bringing into a project via library. Big things, things that are really hard things that you may not have the staff to handle. But if we are afraid to let coders code some stuff, even trivial stuff, then we have killed the one true joy that we had in the first place: coding!
One thing to remember about libraries is that they have bugs too! Just because someones got an apache page, doesn't mean that there are no bugs in there lurking. You WILL most probably need to understand the problem/solution well enough to use the library in the first place.
I thought for coding tests implementations are supposed to be done from scratch on. Or at least the guy who wrote the working parser should be on top of the list.
d0|12 years ago
The thing is clearly marked "pragmatic solutions" rather than most interesting as well.
sp332|12 years ago
eludwig|12 years ago
Look, the fact is, based on the replies below, this guy is probably better off working somewhere else.
Not to go off on this particular person, the preoccupation with "Library Knowledge(tm)" in the enterprise (so, Java) world has become an epidemic. I have seen libraries used for all the wrong reasons, pulling in great gobs of someone elses code to do a bloody string copy!
Damn, you are hiring coders. Let them fricken code, for God's sake.
Please, I know all of the counter arguments (I've been harangued by them for years), but I really think that there is a middle ground here. Some things are truly worth bringing into a project via library. Big things, things that are really hard things that you may not have the staff to handle. But if we are afraid to let coders code some stuff, even trivial stuff, then we have killed the one true joy that we had in the first place: coding!
One thing to remember about libraries is that they have bugs too! Just because someones got an apache page, doesn't mean that there are no bugs in there lurking. You WILL most probably need to understand the problem/solution well enough to use the library in the first place.
Gosh, rant off.
cygwin98|12 years ago