For those of you not following my tweets, I tweeted the other day about http://www.codeeval.com/. This is a great service that basically allows you to create job applications online (no big deal) with the bar to sending it in as passing the programming problem that it presents (very big deal). This could be a big help in theory. You can see how organised they are about coding, for a good enough problem it will show their problem solving skills and their thought processes.
I have a problem with this though, there seems to be no way to block the applicant looking the answers up. There are timed problems, but copy paste is pretty quick once you have found the algorithm on the web. In addition it has a plagiarism detector so you can see if candidates are sharing their answers. This could actually be used by submitting answers that you find on the web. Once a candidate uses the same answers from searching the web the plagiarism detector will flag them.
Considering all of this I would still want to do a reasonable live test as well. My main reason being efficiency of programmers is quite important to me. I cannot stand sitting with someone who is repetitively doing the same slow process over and over again. I saw recently a description of programmers as being "Inherently lazy with just the right amount of motivation." This description presents us with someone that is too lazy to keep doing something that takes 2 minutes over and over again, but will be motivated to spend an hour finding or writing a solution that will make this process automatic. I love this, its true about me, and about many other coders. I remember hearing a quote by Richard Stallman, Founder of the GNU project, who said that he would have never got it done if he wasn't lazy. I cannot find any reference for that right now so don't take me at my word. But I am pretty sure that I read it in Rebel Code. I digress...
I want to see not just efficient solutions to problems but efficient working method to get there. There is nothing more painful than watching someone click on the file menu and select copy and paste, even using right click in an editor, everyone should know ctrl^c ctrl^v. Thats ok, I doubt you would come across many programmers that don't, but there are more examples of things that people can do to work quicker. Selecting, single words and lines are very easy to select by double or triple clickling, no need to be exact about highlighting all the letters. The less a mouse is used the better. Users of VI and EMACS will be proficient at this and will probably be mouse free in other environments too. Additionally X windows users will know that if you highlight something it is copied to the clipboard and can be pasted using a single middle click. Saving too, most of the time its just ctrl^s but not doing it will mean you get prompted to save a few seconds are required of a mouse click, these things do add up. It sounds like I am talking about some pretty irrelevant or small things but trust me when you watch some one who doesn't use these things its slow.
I am not the best at these things, but I definitely notice when they are not being done. When I spent more time in EMACS and VI I taped a list of common commands on the wall behind my monitor. The more I used them the less I had to refer to the list and the faster I got at using these wonderful tools.
One weird thing that I have is about searching through code. I get it if you don't know the code, but there are many shortcuts especially in the IDEs to make it quicker. I much prefer ctrl^j to ctrl^f in Eclipse, but what I prefer the most is being familiar enough with the code to know where to go. Don't search just go straight there. Someone who can type quick enough and knows the shortcuts to search should be able to beat me in a large file. However its the familiarity with the code that I am looking for. If you are my programmer and you don't know the code well enough how can you solve bugs or make feature changes. I am not talking here about new code, I am talking about code the programmer has written themselves. Searching is fine, I would never say to someone that they cannot do it, but I want to see some indication that the code they have spent a few weeks writing is somehow bouncing around their heads.
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