Question for you all… I submitted a programming exercise the other week for a job and did have a quite a silly defect in it (corner case I hadn’t tested for) and the company in question does not want to proceed now (which is their decision, not complaining about that) the feedback up to that point was very positive. It got me wondering though…. I think if I had been the hiring company I would have invited the candidate and see how they would have resolved the issue (not only the bug fix, but also how to test it better.)

What do you think?

(ps. I don’t think there is a right/wrong here… just different ways of handling the situation)

There are many possible scenarios here. Eg. I once got almost rejected because I didn’t write any tests for my programming exercise. If I had them then they would catch any silly corner cases. None of the reviewers didn’t find any bugs - but this didn’t matter.

The instructions for the exercise mentioned TDD, so not writing any tests wouldn’t have been an option in this case 😉

Unfortunately, it sounds like they have more than enough plausible candidates, and therefore won't have to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Hiring/getting hired is pretty random

@pyb yes that had crossed my mind as well.

@thomas: You should come to our place, we dont even have coding tests here

@sveri: sounds good… you can always leave the testing to the customer 😇

Definitly, banana software. Although I think, we still may do a good job. Google for instance is one of our customers 😉

you must be working at a bank then, @sveri -- it matches the profile :)

@lmergen: Nope, Business Process Management and similar stuff.

bananas! 🍌