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Code interviews for a PHP developer roles
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this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2024
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I used to work at a company that used XSLT. They know that it's an obscure language that probably none of the potential candidates have ever worked with. But it's easy enough to learn the basics in an hour or two.
So the entry test was to strip some tags from an XML file. You had a day or two (maybe more) to do it. My solution wasn't ideal, I didn't use several of the shortcuts available in the language. But at least it did what it was supposed to.
A few weeks after I had started working there my boss came up to me, visibly frustrated and asked me whether the test was too hard. Thinking back on my problems I replied that maybe having the desired output ready so that you could test your own solution against it might be nice. But my boss's problem was that none of the last 5 candidates could even send in a solution that would run.
You had so much time, and running an XSLT script is really easy and takes no time at all. And for some inane reason these people couldn't even manage to test their code and still decided to send it in.
And I thought I was an idiot when I didn't know if it was spelled grey or gray in CSS during the in-person interview.
It is very good test for the ability to research, I think. The amount of people who painstakingly went through some video tutorial on PHP and are now developers is insane. I'm sure there's place in the market for them (writing Wordpress themes/plugins, for example), but it's hard to find a programmer with ability to think these days. Not because people are more stupid, but because every other person is a programmer now.
As harsh as this sounds, this test was doing its job. Assuming you're not hiring junior candidates, that is.
One day is enough to research XSLT enough to get the gist, and two is enough for a polished solution. And since we're just stripping tags, we're really just selecting for all the inner text, which is weird but not hard to do with the right selector expression. The task also selects for people that understand XML processing as programmatically manipulating a DOM, which is crucial to wrapping your head around more advanced tasks.
grey and gray are both in CSS. If you've worked with CSS long enough there's a chance you've seen both. :)
I would prefer your kind of test a hundred times over the one on top here.
That said, why would they expect you to know the css color values by heart? I see no usecase for that.
It just came up in a discussion. The test was to spot mistakes in some HTML code. I marked the "gray". The guy I did it with said that that's not a mistake. At least he thinks it's not. We were musing about that for a minute and later found out that I was wrong. Nothing major. I just felt stupid about it.
I felt especially stupid because he seemed to be rather important. While everyone's e-mail address was firstname.lastname@company.tld his was joe@company.tld.
But he was just a nice guy and apparently I did well and got my rather high salary approved.
I would just use #888888 anyway, but which way is it spelled, out of interest?
Both work typically
I wanted to answer "grey", full of confidence. Then I decided to look it up to be sure and found out that it's "gray".
The test was to spot mistakes in a simple html file. So I couldn't substitute anything. And my favourite gray color is #666.
GrAy for Americans and grEy for Europeans. I used to basically flip a coin but I read that mnemonic once and have never forgotten since.
referrer, meet referer.
probably the easiest way to spot someone that's spent a decent amount of time messing with HTTP/1.x headers.
Still trips me up from time to time after all these years!
Gray, the 'murican way.
XSL is like that, I guess.
Some shit still use XSL at my workplace, and once I got a task with them, so... I hit up some online resources and fixed the issue.
I kid you not, from there on, I was (and still am) the XSL guy and gave me more XSL designing and work.
I mean, it's not hard, a tiny little bit complex, but I really just spent half hour researching and some googling during work to complete these tasks, it in its own way makes sense.
But they just... aren't willing to maintain those XSLs, because they indeed looks really ugly and scary in a way.