My challenge internalizing this phrase is that I have a hard time latching onto the idea of simple. It's a highly subjective measurement. For example, if I ask an to implement FizzBuzz & they can't do it, to my satisfaction, are they a not worth hiring? I suppose it depends on what satisfies me. If my criteria for hire/no-hire is whether they wrote concurrent & streaming FizzBuzz, maybe my expectations are unrealistic. If I'm expecting someone to write FizzBuzz in as few characters as possible, am I going to flunk anyone who implements a verbose concurrent & streaming FizzBuzz? Is there a case where it makes sense to hire someone who implements Enterprise FizzBuzz? I may struggle myself with keeping things simple, so there's that to consider :)
Re:I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
by PopeDotNinja on Monday August 27, 2018 @07:04PM
(#17855233)
> There are different approaches, but you can come up with any simple programming task.
That's an exercise I do for hiring in general. For example, every time a hiring process change is proposed, I run it through my existing engineers, and make sure I would have hired them by this process.
For example, in a place that was starting to get a lot of great candidates, someone proposed tightening the education requirements of the preliminary screen. I quickly observed that would have disqualified one of my best performers, who didn't have a CS degree at all. The proposition was therefore struck down.