Timeline for answer to How to test a programmer's ability to handle a large code base? by TooTea
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
Post Revisions
5 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 30, 2025 at 17:14 | comment | added | gnasher729 | OP only got close to a realistic view after one month. And after building a product I’m much more capable to give even rough estimates how long things will take. I worked at a place where the time from receiving a brand new Mac in a box to having a built product was less than two hours. Another place I spent weeks making it build. | |
| Jan 29, 2025 at 20:21 | comment | added | TooTea | @gnasher729 Right, if you wanted an extremely realistic test, it would be like you describe. But you can get fairly close in terms of realism in 3 hours or so, just by skipping the boring parts of actually building and testing the code, and by starting with a well-known project whose general principles are already known to the candidates. Working in a big project means you spend 95% of the time figuring out what someone else's code does and where to change it, so it makes sense to focus testing on this particular skill. | |
| Jan 29, 2025 at 18:42 | comment | added | gnasher729 | There’s a problem. This is a long term job. I’d take a week to document the functionality, review existing documentation , investigating how to build, and starting to look at the source code. Plus making about 20 cups of coffee. Plus time to meet everyone who might help me. | |
| Dec 2, 2024 at 20:13 | comment | added | Brian |
The best engineering interview question I’ve ever gotten is an article discussing such a task. In this case, the task was, "Add a mult command to memcached...You have 3 hours."
|
|
| Dec 2, 2024 at 10:10 | history | answered | TooTea | CC BY-SA 4.0 |