Some months ago, at the beginning of the year, I did quite a lot of interviews while I was looking for a new job. I received a total of 12 offers (but this is another story) and for half of them I had on average 3-4 technical interviews with different levels of interviewers. I can hardly remember now what I was asked to solve/code during all these interviews, what I firmly remember is the one I quit before the end. I was having the second technical interview with one of the CTOs of this venture located in Central Europe (no I will not tell you their name) when the interviewer asked me to write a class to do something (which is not essential to the story). So I did something like this:
class Foo
{
protected $bar;
public function __construct($obj)
{
$this->bar = $obj;
}
public function doSomething()
{
//...
}
//...
}
I also had a test checking the correctness of the code. It was working as expected. Still interviewer was not amused:
I: “naming is bad”
D: “well this is code I’ll trash at the end of the call, I won’t spend time making it nice, I want it to work”
I: “so you don’t write the best code at the first time?”
D: “…well, no, sorry”
I: “ah”
D: “do you know test - code - refactor?”
I: “but naming is bad”
D: “you know what? thanks for your time but I’m not looking for that kind of company. cya!”
Hiring developers: you’re doing it wrong!