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Discussion on: Are You a Mediocre Developer? ME TOO

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ryansmith profile image
Ryan Smith

I'm glad everyone can hear the other side of the story. Your reasoning and process make complete sense, especially for international candidates.

I'm not sure why everyone is jumping to unwarranted employer-bashing. The assignment does not seem out of the realm of possibility, especially for an experienced candidate. It isn't doing a full project for the company that you are not being paid for, the value of this project is assessing a candidate, not putting it into production. I'm sure their developers are more than capable of building this, they do not need to outsource it to interviewees. I do not know too much about Django, but breaking down the project seems like:

  1. Fire up a local Django/Postgres environment, which I'm sure there is a clear how-to guide out there and anyone experience with it should be able to get up and running quickly.
  2. Create the database schema, populate some test data.
  3. Implement CRUD functions to work with the data.
  4. Implement some basic pages to interact with those CRUD functions.
  5. Create a few API endpoints to output some of the data with some filtering options.
  6. Document your solution.

If you are experienced in the language and framework and starting a brand new project, does that take days?

I'm not sure why there are so many dismissive attitudes on performing coding challenges or a demand to be paid for doing them. I find this method to be much better than white-board coding or trivia questions that aren't representative of a good candidate. This method is a better representation of what you will be doing every day (plus you can use any resources you like and are encouraged to do so), so why not interview candidates that way? If the project is massive, I would understand, but I don't feel that this one is.

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lociii profile image
Jens Nistler

Thanks, that's quite precise.

(4) In Django you don't even have to implement a frontend. There is a builtin admin interface which can be easily configured and would fulfill the CRUD requirement.

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yaser profile image
Yaser Al-Najjar • Edited

I do not know too much about Django

Exactly, talking about stuff we don't know is just BAD!

If you are experienced in the language and framework and starting a brand new project, does that take days?

Their "senior" did the task in 6 days:

github.com/vpotter/RHTest/commits/...

What's your take on that?

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lociii profile image
Jens Nistler • Edited

I will only answer on these claims because you're talking about a non-involved third party:

This task had an additional requirement to implement an Angular frontend for someone who never used Angular.
The candidate was a personal reference and we had some extra agreements with him on that part.

Also commits spread over multiple days don't mean that this time has been spent. Most applicants have at least one job and a family. We don't expect them to finish the task within a day just because we ask for max. 5 hours of their time.

Please don't assume anything you cannot know for sure.