cheap programming labor

[bagoffarts]

Say you need a bunch of smallish apps written. For the small cost of putting up a job listing on monster )or whatever jobsite of your choice) you get applicants who seem decent enough by resume. Then talk to them for 15-30 minutes and say that the next step of the hiring process is a 4-6 hour programming test. They'll be excited and work their

Comments

[stonedturtle]

Working as a hiring manager at a company that uses programming tests as entry qualification, I can tell you that most entries aren't worth 5 hours of programming time, even if they were solving a real (rather than school-like) problem.

You're also neglecting one some of the biggest expenses with this approach - documentation, integration, test, and maintenance. And you can bet that code written under that type of time and interview pressure is a recipe for quick hacks and hidden bugs. You'll probably spend more time fixing it than you'd ever gain.

I doubt people would wise up actually, at least if you kept it small scale. But I doubt you'd get anything of value out of it either.

[cosyne]

The idea did occur to me. I tried to make sure to thwart this plan by writing shitty code ;) Well, actually no, but when they asked what I wanted to write a test program in, I had them dig up a computer with matlab on it.

[reichart]

I have EVERYONE write Pong.

It is a fast way for me to see one's coding style, it is a game (so it should be fun even to test while writing it), and they KNOW there is no trick here.

One guy (I hired) wrote a 3D pong, it kicked butt.
One guy made it 100% faithful to the original (which I liked).

Some don't "get it", they can't make it work with multiple keys pressed at the same time, etc.