On Coding Horror, Jeff Atwood recently exposed his incredularity at how many programmers can’t program even the simplest pieces of code. I read through his post and was shaking my head because over the years I have found that many of the people I interview also can’t produce simple code.
We have started testing our candidates with very simple recursion problems and other assorted programming challenges. There is an ongoing debate as to the efficacy of doing this. Does it truly identify weak programmers? Does it create a false sense of elitism? Does it inadvertently weed out brilliant programmers who may be hampered by a language barrier? Forget the nuances of the debate: What I hadn’t realized is how fundamental the questions should probably be. We need to ask even easier questions to start identifying legitimate candidates!
The simplicity can go as low as you want. One example readers provided was: show me how you would swap the values of two variables.
As an aside, I gave the FizzBuzz problem a shot too. I included my result below (it took me almost twenty minutes because I learned about the StringBuilder class while I was writing it — I have been a manager since before Java 5 came out!).
