Is this assessment The Real WTF?
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Lately, we're finding it harder and hard to find developers who know how to write code. They don't teach that, anywhere, anymore, so it's basically a lost art. I think people now a days just randomly type things in their browser-based IDE and hope it becomes a usable application after a few days. So, we no longer give coding assessments.
I we figured we'd lower the bar and see if anyone had the ability to (1) use a search engine, (2) generalize results from said search engine, (3) formulate those results into an intelligible email. So, we came up with this assessment to try this:
PDF: http://44.inedo.com/inedo/1708-techassess.pdf
I'm starting to think the bar still is way too high. What do y'all think? Is this asking too much?
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@apapadimoulis said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
I think people now a days just randomly type things in their browser-based IDE and hope it becomes a usable application after a few days.
Yes
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@apapadimoulis That link is doxxy, did you mean to post it in the lounge?
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@apapadimoulis said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
Is this assessment The Real WTF?
I'm going with yes.
But seriously
-Shrug- sure the bar's still fairly high, but it's out of the pool of people with no common sense, and no drive to go above and beyond. I'd say that's a good thing.
Maaaaaaaaaaybe if you want to give a hint you could explicitly mention that they should use information Available publically online to provide their response.
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@apapadimoulis maybe you could use a recruiter to do some initial filtering for you
run away
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@yamikuronue said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@apapadimoulis That link is doxxy, did you mean to post it in the lounge?
Is it downloadable? I can't access it from within our own network (some day maybe an IT company can help fix that), but it should resolve to some PDF that gives the instruction..
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@apapadimoulis said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@yamikuronue said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@apapadimoulis That link is doxxy, did you mean to post it in the lounge?
Is it downloadable? I can't access it from within our own network (some day maybe an IT company can help fix that), but it should resolve to some PDF that gives the instruction..
It's visible to me from a computer that's not on the VPN. Here it is oneboxed:
Edit: Google Drive seems to not be able to auto-download it, so here's a copy I manually uploaded to Google Drive:
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@apapadimoulis Are you looking for just a quick email describing an overview of the BuildMaster process in response, or are you looking for someone to go through an in-depth instruction via email about how to specifically do each section?
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@e4tmyl33t said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@apapadimoulis Are you looking for just a quick email describing an overview of the BuildMaster process in response, or are you looking for someone to go through an in-depth instruction via email about how to specifically do each section?
Generally, my support question answers are about 1-2× the length of the post I'm replying to.
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@apapadimoulis said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@yamikuronue said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@apapadimoulis That link is doxxy, did you mean to post it in the lounge?
Is it downloadable? I can't access it from within our own network (some day maybe an IT company can help fix that), but it should resolve to some PDF that gives the instruction..
I was able to open the url when I opened it in a new tab, but the preview no worky.
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@ben_lubar said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@e4tmyl33t said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@apapadimoulis Are you looking for just a quick email describing an overview of the BuildMaster process in response, or are you looking for someone to go through an in-depth instruction via email about how to specifically do each section?
Generally, my support question answers are about 1-2× the length of the post I'm replying to.
you can't count a random screenshot as 1000 words, ben
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@ben_lubar said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@e4tmyl33t said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@apapadimoulis Are you looking for just a quick email describing an overview of the BuildMaster process in response, or are you looking for someone to go through an in-depth instruction via email about how to specifically do each section?
Generally, my support question answers are about 1-2× the length of the post I'm replying to.
That's why I'm asking, the question is kinda phrased as "Give me a walkthrough of how to do this", but I don't know that that's the actual expectation in the response. Hell, I had typed up most of a decent overview-style response as a "Let's see if a non-coder can fulfill Alex's expectation" before I went back and reread it and said "Wait a minute, is that what the customer is actually asking for?"
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@e4tmyl33t said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@apapadimoulis Are you looking for just a quick email describing an overview of the BuildMaster process in response, or are you looking for someone to go through an in-depth instruction via email about how to specifically do each section?
Something in between I guess...
Automating tomcat deployments should be easy to understand (see: first few google results), even if you've never used Java. There are lot of a lot of step-by-step guides out there that say exactly what steps to follow. Once you know those steps, implementing those in a BuildMaster deployment plan is also trivial.
It's really an assessment of being able to generalize, I think.
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@e4tmyl33t said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
That's why I'm asking, the question is kinda phrased as "Give me a walkthrough of how to do this", but I don't know that that's the actual expectation in the response. Hell, I had typed up most of a decent overview-style response as a "Let's see if a non-coder can fulfill Alex's expectation" before I went back and reread it and said "Wait a minute, is that what the customer is actually asking for?"
Well the whole idea is see if you can figure out the steps required to deploy a Tomcat app, then figure out how to accomplish those steps in BuildMaster. Both tools you haven't used before.
The underlying knowledge required, I believe, is zip/archive files, directories, and windows services (daemons).
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@apapadimoulis Sounds reasonable.
I would make one change. You should explicitly state the candidate is expected to use google to find the correct information. My first instinct was to write how I imagined the process might look like, figuring you are testing primarily my communication skills and that the specifics of Tomcat and BuildMaster don't matter.
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Found the problem with the survey.
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@cartman82 good feedback.
What do you think about adding this?
This scenario does not require any prior knowledge of Tomcat or BuildMaster. You do not need to install either program, and you should be using only a search engine to complete this assessment.
We are primarily looking for your ability to quickly gather a basic understanding of a technology without needing to become an expert on it, and generalize that understanding into a response.
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@apapadimoulis said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
What do you think about adding this?
Sounds good.
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@apapadimoulis said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
now a days
Am I missing some wel lknown WTD
intentional mis. spelling?
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@ben_lubar said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
Generally, my support question answers are about 1-2× the length of the post I'm replying to.
Wait, you're hiring another Ben Lubar?
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@apapadimoulis said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@e4tmyl33t said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
That's why I'm asking, the question is kinda phrased as "Give me a walkthrough of how to do this", but I don't know that that's the actual expectation in the response. Hell, I had typed up most of a decent overview-style response as a "Let's see if a non-coder can fulfill Alex's expectation" before I went back and reread it and said "Wait a minute, is that what the customer is actually asking for?"
Well the whole idea is see if you can figure out the steps required to deploy a Tomcat app, then figure out how to accomplish those steps in BuildMaster. Both tools you haven't used before.
The underlying knowledge required, I believe, is zip/archive files, directories, and windows services (daemons).
This is somewhat train-of-thought based as I try to approach the task, as I figured you might find it useful
I assume you're looking for something more substantial than Alana's response here?
Figuring out (what I think is) how to deploy a Tomcat app was relatively easy, but I must confess the BuildMaster Getting Started Tutorial leaves me baffled at how to translate that into any sort of useful help, as someone who knows nothing about BuildMaster. The screenshots all lack context - modal dialog snippets without any contextual screenshots showing how they all fit together / come from.
In any case, I get the feeling that the important part here is connecting the processes of
- Detecting changes in the target directory (the only place I see a windows service/daemon being useful, so far), and
- Issuing the relevant deploy statement(s) to Tomcat
with particular steps in creating or modifying a BuildMaster deployment plan. However, the documentation I've read so far doesn't seem to do a great job of communicating how it all works without downloading and messing around with BuildMaster myself - something the assessment discourages doing.
The Deployment Plans and related documentation seems to be more useful, aside from the red herring at the beginning that pushed me towards the unhelpful tutorial.
I'm going to assume that the point isn't to push for continuous integration but rather automating a currently manual task, so we're going to stick with the customer's developers pushing webapps to a share, which should then be picked up / detected by a windows service and automatically deployed by BuildMaster. Which is not something I would have thought if you hadn't mentioned it here - without what I quoted above, I'd have assumed this was something BuildMaster could already do on its own.
Thus, the basic gist of the reply so far would be to setup a windows service to:
- Monitor the share,
- Automatically create a release package for any new items using a release template, and then
- Push the new release package into a global pipeline that uses the relevant Tomcat command(s) in one of the deployment steps.
Am I on the right track here, or wildly off base?
Caveat emptor: I'm an amateur with no experience of professional coding yet, nor any exposure to release automation or other application life-cycle management programs/systems other than source control. Others with more experience with such tools, even if not BuildMaster specifically, may be more likely to be able to quickly understand and follow your documentation than I was. Also, I'm trying to do this on only 2 ½ hours sleep and am probably not at my best, comprehension-wise.
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@dreikin definitely a good answer, I'd grade it pass. It shows a solid attempt to try to connect the two ideas together, which was the main point of the assessment.
Am I on the right track here, or wildly off base?
I think you took it definitely "further" than we were thinking, in that you provided more much more BuildMaster process information than would have been needed. But that's fine, it shows you went down a path of trying to understand BuildMaster.
The "perfect" solution to this problem involves finding the "actual" technical steps required, and then giving guidance on how to do those steps to BuildMaster. Keep in mind the user was "moderately experienced", so you can assume they're already more familiar with the BuildMaster than you... they just don't know how to automate a Tomcat deploy.
Actually Alana's answer (which you found) points in the "how to" direction, just needs a little further work: stop Tomcat service, deploy war file (ideally: "exploded", i.e. unzipped), start tomcat service.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@apapadimoulis said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
1708-techassess
1,708 Tech Asses S?
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@apapadimoulis said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
definitely a good answer, I'd grade it pass.
There's one slight problem though. Anyone smart enough to be posting here on the forum and not soundly laughed off the premises is already beyond the usual realm of mouth breathers and droolies that make up 90% of the IT 'industry'.
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@apapadimoulis said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
Well the whole idea is see if you can figure out the steps required to deploy a Tomcat app, then figure out how to accomplish those steps in BuildMaster. Both tools you haven't used before.
It sounds a little bit unfair - if I knew what Tomcat is even vaguely I could skip at least googling for its definition, and if I had experience working with it the task would probably be a hell of a lot easier.
Other than that I'd say it's fine, though it's a bit strange that you'd expect the devs to do first-line support. I like the idea of explicitly testing Google skills and being able to adapt. Certainly a requirement for a medior-level developer - for a junior you can expect them to need some hand holding, but I'd expect a mid-level dev to be self-sustainable for the most part.
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@arantor said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@apapadimoulis said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
definitely a good answer, I'd grade it pass.
There's one slight problem though. Anyone smart enough to be posting here on the forum and not soundly laughed off the premises is already beyond the usual realm of mouth breathers and droolies that make up 90% of the IT 'industry'.
Can o count myself as a part of this group, given how much I've been laughed at for using an iPhone?
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@maciejasjmj said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@apapadimoulis said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
Well the whole idea is see if you can figure out the steps required to deploy a Tomcat app, then figure out how to accomplish those steps in BuildMaster. Both tools you haven't used before.
It sounds a little bit unfair - if I knew what Tomcat is even vaguely I could skip at least googling for its definition, and if I had experience working with it the task would probably be a hell of a lot easier.
Other than that I'd say it's fine, though it's a bit strange that you'd expect the devs to do first-line support. I like the idea of explicitly testing Google skills and being able to adapt. Certainly a requirement for a medior-level developer - for a junior you can expect them to need some hand holding, but I'd expect a mid-level dev to be self-sustainable for the most part.
+1'd for using the term "medior".
Filed under: @cartman82, you're making the future here, baby!
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@kt_ said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
Can o count myself as a part of this group, given how much I've been laughed at for using an iPhone?
It's Nescafé we take issue with.
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@maciejasjmj said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@kt_ said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
Can o count myself as a part of this group, given how much I've been laughed at for using an iPhone?
It's Nescafé we take issue with.
Ah, but that only says bad things about you. If you never get Nescafé-enlightened, you'll never be good people.
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@kt_ I use an iPad and haven't been laughed off the premises yet. And neither have you, I think...
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@arantor said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@kt_ I use an iPad and haven't been laughed off the premises yet. And neither have you, I think...
Well, I have been laughed st, but not laughed off the premises. Yet, I might have been, just haven't realized that. :D
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@kt_ Nah. You can keep up with the technical discussions well enough to not be laughed off the premises.
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@arantor said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@kt_ Nah. You can keep up with the technical discussions well enough to not be laughed off the premises.
And if I can't keep up, I can always
!
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@kt_ said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
If you never get Nescafé-enlightened
I didn't know Nescafé was that bad
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@apapadimoulis said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
So, we no longer give coding assessments.
You're saying the "C# .Net Developer" talent pool in the Cleveland metro area is so depleted that what's left can't even handle @cartman82's fruits?
That's... wow.
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@twelvebaud said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
can't even handle @cartman82's fruits?
Why would that be a requirem...
Oh, you meant the coding task, didn't you?
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@twelvebaud said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
can't even handle @cartman82's fruits
Take it from me, it takes a real professional to handle @cartman82's fruits. An amateur would be completely overwhelmed by their magnificent magnitude!
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@maciejasjmj said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@apapadimoulis said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
Well the whole idea is see if you can figure out the steps required to deploy a Tomcat app, then figure out how to accomplish those steps in BuildMaster. Both tools you haven't used before.
It sounds a little bit unfair - if I knew what Tomcat is even vaguely I could skip at least googling for its definition, and if I had experience working with it the task would probably be a hell of a lot easier.
Other than that I'd say it's fine, though it's a bit strange that you'd expect the devs to do first-line support. I like the idea of explicitly testing Google skills and being able to adapt. Certainly a requirement for a medior-level developer - for a junior you can expect them to need some hand holding, but I'd expect a mid-level dev to be self-sustainable for the most part.
Come to think of it, though... An hour isn't nearly enough for a crash course on both Java ecosystem and Buildmaster, so what the task actually asks for is to cargo-cult the problem and give the client an answer that you're not sure why - or even if - it works, with nothing to back it but "that site says so".
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@kt_ said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
And if I can't keep up, I can always
!Technical discussions are hard, let's
!
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This post is deleted!
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@maciejasjmj said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
Come to think of it, though... An hour isn't nearly enough for a crash course on both Java ecosystem and Buildmaster, so what the task actually asks for is to cargo-cult the problem and give the client an answer that you're not sure why - or even if - it works, with nothing to back it but "that site says so".
Exactly. I don't know what "cargo-cult the problem" means, but quickly understanding a particular case, system-izing it, and then giving an answer you're not sure of is precisely what we (or any other technical product support company) has to do.
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@apapadimoulis "cargo-cult" as a verb is a reference to cargo cults with the connotation that "the person doing it has NO clue at all what he's doing and has at most a 50% chance of being correct - his previous attempts just included enough useful and useless things that it seemed to work".
So what I think @Maciejasjmj is implying is that you might be leaving a lot up to chance: did the interviewee really put two and two together or was he lucky to find something resembling the question and faff around the rest of the time?
Ideally you would check up with them to see if they tried to verify what they wrote by checking different sources or if they just picked the first thing which seemed OK.
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@jbert said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
you might be leaving a lot up to chance: did the interviewee really put two and two together or was he lucky to find something resembling the question
One of cartmans fruits was the perfect example of this. Did everything wrong, but was millimeters away from the right answer, but just didn't know it, and failed miserably.
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@jbert said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
Ideally you would check up with them to see if they tried to verify what they wrote by checking different sources or if they just picked the first thing which seemed OK.
Ah, yes. It's mostly a filter. Part of the actual interview process would be discussing how they reached that answer, judging technical acumen and all that. But it's a great initial filter.
Actually most applicants won't even attempt it, or maybe they are so incredibly overwhelmed they are afraid to ask questions? In any case, in Cleveland, it's super-rare to be given any sort of technical assessment or coding test for programming jobs.
You don't really need to know how to program to be a coder in this city :(
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@apapadimoulis said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
You don't really need to know how to program to be a coder in this city
A-fucking-men. We have lots of bluffers come through our interview process as well. We've started going right to programming bootcamps to recruit their grads and train them up instead.
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@yamikuronue said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
We've started going right to programming bootcamps to recruit their grads and train them up instead.
Those bootcamp grads are impressive!! They have GitHub repos filled with solid content (unit tests and all), as well as impressive-looking resumes and cover letters that explain why you should hire them despite having no experience.
Granted the repos are all nearly identical, and the resume/covers are slight variations of eachother... but I'm sure they all arrived at the ability to do those things independently through their ten solid weeks of hard training!
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@apapadimoulis said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@jbert said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
Ideally you would check up with them to see if they tried to verify what they wrote by checking different sources or if they just picked the first thing which seemed OK.
Ah, yes. It's mostly a filter. Part of the actual interview process would be discussing how they reached that answer, judging technical acumen and all that. But it's a great initial filter.
Actually most applicants won't even attempt it, or maybe they are so incredibly overwhelmed they are afraid to ask questions? In any case, in Cleveland, it's super-rare to be given any sort of technical assessment or coding test for programming jobs.
You don't really need to know how to program to be a coder in this city :(
So... Are any of your job openings suitable for a junior level programmer with no professional experience, a crappy résumé, and a strong preference to work remotely (at least until I've built up funds to afford moving somewhere), but can pass both that assessment and the fruit mettle?
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@dreikin said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@apapadimoulis said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
@jbert said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
Ideally you would check up with them to see if they tried to verify what they wrote by checking different sources or if they just picked the first thing which seemed OK.
Ah, yes. It's mostly a filter. Part of the actual interview process would be discussing how they reached that answer, judging technical acumen and all that. But it's a great initial filter.
Actually most applicants won't even attempt it, or maybe they are so incredibly overwhelmed they are afraid to ask questions? In any case, in Cleveland, it's super-rare to be given any sort of technical assessment or coding test for programming jobs.
You don't really need to know how to program to be a coder in this city :(
So... Are any of your job openings suitable for a junior level programmer with no professional experience, a crappy résumé, and a strong preference to work remotely (at least until I've built up funds to afford moving somewhere), but can pass both that assessment and the fruit mettle?
Asking for a friend...
BuildMaster work sounds pretty cool actually, devops are kimd of my thing. And I can solve the fruit mettle in pure LINQ, if you ever find yourself on an embedded system with just a System.Linq DLL preloaded into ROM.
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@dreikin said in Is this assessment The Real WTF?:
"work remotely"
That's one thing we're just not very good at handling, unfortunately. It's a big workflow change, because we need to change the way we plan things. Whiteboards and in-person meetings let you share/plan a lot easier.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5-zDODl1jqDVzhaMF8zaWZzSnM/view?usp=sharing
