Re:Codility - Automated tests of programming skills
by andrewcooke on Friday January 08, 2010 @07:34AM
(#1039362)
maybe there's more than one task, but the task i took appeared to be completely specified (the one where you find a balance point - i may have remembered the name wrong - for an array, so that the sum of elements to either side is equal).
it wasn't obvious to me what to do on first read, but when i paid a little more attention, everything was there (including edge cases, as far as i could see). in particular, they gave a formal numerical expression that was unambiguous (and which didn't seem to contradict the text).
Re:Codility - Automated tests of programming skills
by marcin on Friday January 08, 2010 @07:39AM
(#1039374)
Yep, it's good to read the specs in detail ;)
Re:Codility - Automated tests of programming skills
by loup-vaillant on Friday January 08, 2010 @09:20AM
(#1039540)
The spec was clear, but the fact that the test dataset used for the test was the very one given as an example wasn't. plus, it was a bit frustrating not being able to fiddle with the test dataset. I would have done it locally with my compiler, but the necessary boilerplate would have lost me time. So, I didn't test enough, and made a silly error which went undetected because of the trailing zero. I still got 75%, but that looks quite miraculous.
EDIT: It appears I can customize my test dataset, and I didn't see it. Silly me.
It's also taking a metric fuckton of time to evaluate my solution. Which apparently fails. For reasons I can't debug because I can't see the test data.
Any company that relies on code snippets, incomplete problem statements and undefined test data to judge coders will get what they deserve.