Using puzzles to find good developers
Posted by andy in : Agile, Software, Teams on May 31, 2007As a follow up to my post on pair programming based interviews, I noticed this on a recent job advert:
In chess it is possible to place eight queens on a board so that no one queen can be taken by any other. Write a program to determine all such possible arrangements for all eight. I am not looking for a Chess Games Developer. I am looking for Java Developers who have the OOA and OOD skills to solve this problem….
Which one would you prefer (to receive if going for an interview, or to use to find a good candidate to work in your team)? A test that’s abstract and has nothing to do with the work involved, or one that that involves doing the job you are interviewing for?
I wonder if they have run this test on all of their existing staff to see if their is any useful correlation.
Even worse, the Eight Queens Problem is a constraint satisfaction problem for which OO is not a good fit. Testing the candidate’s OO A & D skills will not demonstrate if they able to solve those kind of problems.