Seems like it's a decent way to verify spurious claims that are not well confirmed in a spoken portion of the job interview. It feels like a FizzBuzz version of environment knowledge and tools skills.
The kind of coding tests I don't like are the ones that seem too onerous and involved for the given role. I have recently phone interviewed with a company, which they don't make their own software as a revenue source but build software for other clients. I talked over the phone with one of the lead programmers, discussed my skills, situations related to my work experience, etc.
Afterwards, he issued me a coding exercise with a VERY DETAILED .pdf document that felt uncomfortably close to a request for proposal and summaries of requirements. I hesitated and replied back about this. They assured me that this is not unpaid work and that everyone has to take this same test, in the language of their choosing. The test was intended to produce code for a MVC web app that they can evaluate. So I guess they really wanted sample code, despite having already produced other samples from Github, and discussed my real-world MVC work projects from my perspective as a mid-level developer (including one where I had architectural control).
I think the most disappointing thing, though, is that this long test is mandatory for everyone that they interview. So, the responses and decisions you make in the phone interview portion don't seem to have any real impact on the next step in the process. Someone could have a highly popular library on Github and they could still say, okay you gotta take this test. Non-trivial tests should be tailor made to a person's own experience.
Comments
Seems like it's a decent way to verify spurious claims that are not well confirmed in a spoken portion of the job interview. It feels like a FizzBuzz version of environment knowledge and tools skills.
The kind of coding tests I don't like are the ones that seem too onerous and involved for the given role. I have recently phone interviewed with a company, which they don't make their own software as a revenue source but build software for other clients. I talked over the phone with one of the lead programmers, discussed my skills, situations related to my work experience, etc.
Afterwards, he issued me a coding exercise with a VERY DETAILED .pdf document that felt uncomfortably close to a request for proposal and summaries of requirements. I hesitated and replied back about this. They assured me that this is not unpaid work and that everyone has to take this same test, in the language of their choosing. The test was intended to produce code for a MVC web app that they can evaluate. So I guess they really wanted sample code, despite having already produced other samples from Github, and discussed my real-world MVC work projects from my perspective as a mid-level developer (including one where I had architectural control).
I think the most disappointing thing, though, is that this long test is mandatory for everyone that they interview. So, the responses and decisions you make in the phone interview portion don't seem to have any real impact on the next step in the process. Someone could have a highly popular library on Github and they could still say, okay you gotta take this test. Non-trivial tests should be tailor made to a person's own experience.