Recently, I created a blog post on developer interview questions I ask as weed out questions. I'm back on this topic because Jeff Atwood blogged on it recently and I figured I should follow up on my own experiences.
All in all, I phone screened 17 candidates for the software developer positions that were open. Here are the results:
3 candidates answered most the questions and passed the fizzbuzz coding test in person. One was senior, one was midlevel, and one was fresh out of college.
3 candidates did reasonably well on the questions, but failed the fizzbuzz test completely.
1 candidate answered most the questions, but when presented with fizzbuzz they created a solution, but didn't follow the instructions given (went from 0 to 100 instead of 1 to 100).
10 candidates failed the phone screen being unable to describe basic OO principles.
So basically we had a 76% outright failure rate. I was still trying to decide if that's acceptable or if my interview process is too difficult but then looking at Steve Yegge's post, maybe it's not difficult enough. I was quite happy to see though that on the question set that the questions I came up with were pretty similar to his. I'm definitely going to borrow some of his other simple code questions though too so I don't have to rely on FizzBuzz all the time.
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posted @ Thursday, January 24, 2008 10:14 AM