So I'm not quite sure what is your beef with it exactly. Do you think I should have used a more complicated task? Like, Dijkstras' on a graph? Are you sure that you wouldn't find that objectionable too, given that sorting an array is apparently asking too much?
a) is too easy
b) doesn't have enough meat to differentiate between junior / regular / senior
c) covers very little if anything at all from what a SWE does on their day to day. OTOH I guess/hope you had more things, not just this.
This was the only coding test but we also either talked through opensource code candidates brought in or discussed some parts of one our real project here.
But, you are hiring for a software developer, who should be able to translate business problems that you face everyday into a working system. Don’t you have any real world scenarios that you could use to test on?
In your case, at the end you've only figured out that your candidate knows how to sort an array, which even high-school students can do. You can confidently say that your candidate has a level somewhere between student and Donald Knuth, a pretty useless piece of information.
Is there any connection between sorting arrays and spanning trees? If I'm not mistaken, the latter involves graphs.