Exactly! We're just trying to weed out the ones that really can't program at all. There are a lot of them.

I love that feeling - when you know you're the dumbest person in the room and all there is for you to do is absorb knowledge.

Whoah. Calm down, man. You're about to have a degree in a decent field, and yeah finding the first position will be tough but I promise you will have a better career than retail sales. If your degree hasn't adequately prepared you, which I totally believe, there are lots of ways to pick up those skills.

I like this. Seems right that for a senior level position they'd just want to push until they found your knowledge gaps. I think developing that report with them, where the recursion problem became more of a discussion, is what got you the job.

C# and the database is SQL Server 2012. All candidates have listed multi-year experience with these technologies on their resumes. No stored procedures, but the query they would have to write would literally be "SELECT * FROM Table"

Quite frankly, I think that's a cop-out. There's nothing manipulative about asking a developer to write code before you hire them. There are no trick questions, no convoluted problems, and they have full access to us and Google. Candidates are aware coming into the interview that they will be writing code. Even…

Exactly! Even if it's not something you'd done before, we're literally allowing you to use the sum of human knowledge to solve the problem.

I literally showed this exact blog post to my bosses about this very issue. I love Coding Horror. No joke, the best hire we've made recently was a guy with no formal training or experience. Had just been doing it himself as a hobby for a little while.

If you had six years of professional experience under your belt do you think you could? You're right, it's not difficult, but this is literally the situation I've seen recently. It's crazy.

In the Charlotte, NC area. What types of questions do you have for your questionnaire? We ask pre-screen questions over the phone, but it's standard stuff. When would you use an abstract class or interface - that kind of stuff.

C#. All candidates so far have claimed on their resumes to have multiple years experience developing in the language.

I mean, our test is really simple. It shouldn't take more than ten minutes or so for an experienced developer. We give them thirty. No lie, I had a developer today with six years of experience who couldn't get the connection string to the database correct. Oh, and I forgot to mention - they can ask us questions and…

Looking at the tests you were given makes me sad. We have a simple developer test: write an application that simply reads data from some table in a database and write that data to a file. We've been interviewing for months without a single passing candidate. :(

Pocket Casts instead of Podcasts (iOS / Android)

Same, mine is pretty small. At this point, I know I'm getting chicken from this lady, and pork chops from this guy, and whatever produce happens to be in season. 10 minutes, in and out, then I figure out what to do with it once I get home.

I'm going to go ahead and disagree here and say that money at least makes you "happier". I went from an AGI of $9k to an AGI over ten times that in the space of about five years. Let me tell you, I've still got problems but these problems are WAY better than my poor problems were. I'm definitely happier, and money…

I tried this exercise, but my calculator just says, "OVERFLOW" :(

Same, only I've gotten into the habit of the three finger tap for it. Super convenient.

Not really, it's just that there's like 1/2 cup of lime juice in it. Lime is a huge part of the flavor.

There's one in particular that I don't think that will work for, but I'll try it with a few others.