I rejected 4 job candidates in as many days, using the new technique of “Give them an assignment, see what happens.” The difficult question right now is what kind of assignment I should give. I sometimes feel like what I’m giving is too hard for a junior and if I had interviewed myself out of college I wouldn’t have hired myself – a mistake I should avoid.
3 of the techniques I tried are:
1. Look at this shader code I wrote and give me feedback on how to optimize or improve it
2. This lookup is using a linear search. Change the data structure to an optimized list.
3. Write code to send a list to the server, have the server sort it, and send it back
The answers I’ve gotten are:
1. Uh, it looks OK. (On further code review the guy didn’t understand basic C++)
2. Implemented using a map, instead of an ordered list, and was incorrect as he didn’t understand how to use C style strings
3. Had the client sort the list instead of the server, and attempted to write quicksort on the spot rather than using the existing ordered list class I provide, or stl, and also couldn’t make a project for RakNet after 1.5 hours even though I give example projects and instructions on it.
So far there’s only one guy I rejected out of hand due to price, which was $35 an hour where I knew I couldn’t talk him down. He was also the best candidate by an order of magnitude, with real experience. I’m on the edge about that one. I can’t afford it, but I feel someone like that could make real progress in the game.