Tell HN: TechTestNow, an app to help you hire the best coders

Recruiters cannot take tests - only candidates can. Note that you can easily create a new account at the 'take test' page (please use one of your email addresses).

1. Viewing a playback of how the candidate coded the question.

Even a bad candidate might be able to 'prettify' his final code (or even craftily cut and paste code while solving the problem).

However, it is almost impossible to do so in a playback of the entire coding process.

It is like the difference in complexity between creating a fake photo vs creating a fake video !

2. Adaptive testing

Depending on the performance of the candidate, the questions presented will increase or decrease in difficulty - allowing the system to accurately assess the candidate's skill level (that is the advantage of using several small questions, as opposed to a few large questions).

3. The ability to embed the testing widget both on your website or even on a job posting on a job site - that way candidates never even have to leave your website.

I myself do not possess an encyclopedic knowledge, nor will you see my fingers flying over the keyboard.

On the other hand, what I have noticed is that my understanding of the basics of coding, i.e. how to mix and match loops, arrays, conditionals, etc has vastly improved over time.

I frequently forget advanced or language specific topics - and I don't really care, since I can easily re-read about them online and refresh myself.

I have worked as an examiner for computer science university students and also as an interviewer for new hires for companies. What I have noticed is that the best candidates are similar - they have a rock solid grasp of the fundamentals of the language, and just twist and turn that knowledge to acquire the results they need.

You yourself have mentioned this - a good developer with an understanding of ORM can easily adapt to whichever framework he is required to use.

This mastery of the basics is what we are trying to assess with TechTestNow. You might notice that none of the questions require in-depth knowledge of the APIs (although that knowledge might help you solve some of them faster, there is always a solution that uses only basic constructs).

The main reason the tests are timed is because, all said and done, a good programmer does need to have a certain coding speed !

Also, in real life, a lot of time is spent not on figuring out how to solve a problem, but rather on figuring out what the problem is in the first place - what do we really need to do ? (and can it be done at all ?). Although the problems given in TechTestNow might seem contrived, they do have the advantage of being unambiguous, so that the programmer can just concentrate on writing a solution.

For example, I'll take the following question :

'Given the string variable 's' and the integer 'n', return a new string consisting of n repetitions of s.

For example, if s = "abc" and n = 3, you should return "abcabcabc".'

The code you have written is as follows :

String duplicate(String s, int n) {

  String result = s;
  // First assignment already done

  while (n > 0) {
     result += s;
     n--;
  }

  return result;

If we analyze the following code (assuming that s = "abc" and n = 3), initially, the variable 'result' is assigned the value "abc".

The loop then runs 3 times - when n = 3, when n = 2 and when n = 1. Which effectively means that "abc" is concatenated 3 more times giving the string "abcabcabcabc", which is incorrect.

I do agree that the solution is almost right. Note that you are allowed to compile your code and run it against our testdata (and even your own test cases) in order to establish it's correctness - which means that you did have the opportunity to find out that there was a bug in your code and fix it.

But in computing, how often is it acceptable to get things 'almost' right ? Would you be happy if Google returned search results which were almost right ?

I know that if a human conducted the interview, he would have helped guide you through the test - in fact, we are almost done adding the capability for recruiters to monitor test sessions in real time and converse with candidates.

I can also provide a case by case analysis of your other solutions if you wish.