Today I did a test to hire a junior developer. From about 20 applications, I did select 6 that I thought were the best and from them only 4 did show up! I presented to them a test that I thought was pretty easy. Here are the questions of the test:
- Write a program that will print out the longest sequence without prime numbers, less than a given number N.
Example: If N is give 30, the sequence is 24, 25, 26, 27, 28.
- Write a program that print out the result of the following method called with a value of 6.
public static void mystery(int n) {
if (n == 0 || n == 1) return;
mystery(n-2);
println(n);
mystery(n-1);
}
- The table Orders has the following fields Id, Product, Amount, Price. Write a query to print out the product name and amount for all products that have "TV" in their name and for which the amount ordered is bigger than 1,000 euro.
- Describe with a single sentence the following terms: HTTP, HTML, CSS, jQuery, XML, SQL, C#, SVN, IL, SEO.
- Describe the last project that you have worked for and the solution you have implemented explaining why you did it that way.
The total test had 100 points and I was expecting all of them to get at least 50-60 points. It turns out it was too much! Two of the candidates were already working as software developers and they got 15 points!!! I don't see how on earth they would produce anything useful. The other two were still students and were able to get 45-50 points which in comparison it's a pretty good result, but considering the test it's pretty poor!
It's a pretty sad state, when your best candidate for software developer isn't able to write a simple SQL query!