On Monday I met the guys behind Codility – quite an interesting system designed to help with the recruitment of software developers.
Basically, it lets you set simple programming tasks for developers, which they can perform online and in the language of their or your choice, and then sends you a report of how their code performed against a variety of edge cases, for large datasets, etc. If you’re a programmer, try out the demo – I found it quite fun!
I think there is real value in this in a couple of areas, beyond its obvious use to those hiring developers. Firstly, as a way for teachers of programming to set coursework. And secondly as something that would give recruitment agencies a bit more credibility when they’re bombarding me with spam. I would be much more likely to look at their candidates if I knew they had gone through a preliminary level of filtering, especially if they had completed tasks in more than one programming language.
Anyway, very nicely done – worth checking out.
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Yes, that is quite fun. Does everyone get the same problem? I managed 94% – I think I’ll have to offer myself a pay rise….
Interviewing “programmers” has been a hot topic on Jeff Atwood’s blog http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/02/the-nonprogramming-programmer.html
You can make recruitment tests here : http://recruitment.toitl.com
The skills you can test are : jQuery, SQL, PHP, CSS, Jscript.
The candidates have to write code in a limited time.