Code interviews for a PHP developer roles

Any sufficiently skilled developer has a bunch of things they hate about the language they use the most, and are happy to tell you about it.

This is a characteristic I unironically keep an eye out for when hiring.

The fuck kind of programming language is "smalltalk"?

I was thinking the same thing. I mean, I just did a coding test for a potential job, and I know I did at least as good as, and likely better than this.

edit: just to prove to myself, I went ahead and wrote the program without looking things up. I'm self-taught so I feel pretty proud. It took about 25 mins, and it works!

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.

You had a day or two [...] none of the last 5 candidates could even send in a solution that would run.

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.

I would just use #888888 anyway, but which way is it spelled, out of interest?

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.

Ewwwww, macbook. Oh, wait. It was sarcasm I guess.

I would just write down the steps I would take, just some psudocode. It doesn't have to work, it just has to make sense in the style of the language you're talking about.

import random library  
import any GUI/display libraries required for the outcome desired

build array of integers [1..52] (or 0..51 if you're being fancy)
for loop 1..1000
       select random number A 1..52 (or 0..51 if you used that above)
       select random number B 1..52 (or 0..51 if you used that above)
       swap elements in the array A and B
pop first two elements from array
decode at display time what the two numbers represent in terms of playing cards

If the test requires more than that, then they're crazy. The syntax doesn't matter, just that you can logic yourself through the problem.
You can use the IDE, google, or whatever to fill in the specifics. If you wanted me to do that in literally any programming language, once the psudocode is done, you just spend an hour or so looking up the details.

Even the odd numbers stuff? I think interviewers account for nerves and being outside an IDE. You might draw a blank but would you be would be randomly adding things like these did?

for some reason I still needed to know programming on paper so much so that at the university, in class prgramming we had to do the exam on paper. every time. no matter if it was Java or C++...

I strangely enjoyed it, but it still was kinda weird.

Yeah, I really liked my prof for some of the programming courses, but also damn him for making us write code on paper in the exams

Actually, I prefer this one: for(_=[];_<+!![]+""+[]*[]+[]*[];_++%+(!![]+!![])?[]:console.log(_));

This is why I prefer live interviews. I tell them they can use whatever tools they want, search for anything they want, there are no restrictions. All I ask is that they share their entire screen (if not in person) and try to "think out loud" as much as possible. I then time-box each step (usually 15m ea in a 1-hour interview).

I am most interested in HOW they solve the challenges I set out for them. Whether they complete it or not is usually irrelevant.

Edit: Lately, though - I warn against AI. I don't ban it, but every person that has tried to use AI in an interview has gone down in flames. AI simply cannot be trusted... and if you haven't learned that lesson, and you can't even tell when it's giving you bad information... yikes.

I mean, it's a hard problem to solve if you never worked with moduli before.

I jump between languages so much I can never remember the structure.

for item in items? Or item of items or items as item?

Best to just have the IDE auto complete it.

Knowing about and having met multiple such "senior Devs" has made me feel so much better about my work and my own set of skills, not gonna lie.

But they are the same thing.

This is on the easier end of the scale to be sure, but as someone who's interviewed candidates with similar questions, it eliminates a surprising number of people...

My theory is that modern coding bootcamps stuff their students full of buzzwords instead of letting them learn the basics

When I interview people, I don't care how they get an answer, I want to see that they can get to the answer, ideally the correct one, but it doesn't matter if it's wrong. I want them to show me their problem solving skills and that they understand their own solution.

If you can read existing code and understand complexities you are already better than 80% of these hires.

That's like stage one where you filter out the obviously incompetent ones.

You wouldn't believe how many candidates with years of experience can't figure out those simple problems. Or even the super well known fizzbuzz.

It's insane, people will claim like 2-3 years of experience with Ansible, they can't even get a file copied. Couple years of Python, they don't understand async, generators and other pretty basic features.

People have always been lying a bit about their experience but it's getting way, way out of control.

You might get something harder after that. But there's a reason one of the most common code interview questions is FizzBuzz. There's a shocking number of applicants that can't do it.

We eliminate half our candidates when they can't even answer what is static in Java. Or what is object oriented programming. Ours is less coding tests and more explaining Java concepts.

I always feel bad when I try out a new coding problem for interviews because I feel I'm going to offend candidates with such an easy problem (I interview mostly for senior positions). And I'm always shocked by how few are able to solve them. The current problem I use requires splitting a text into words as a first step. I show them the text, it's the entire text of a book, not just some simple sentence. I don't think I've had a single candidate do that correctly yet (most just split by a single space character even though they've seen it's a whole book with newlines, punctuation, quotes, parentheses, etc).

Depends if you're working for a good company or one trying to hire people in a third world country for a dollar a day.

The previous candidate to me at a job a few years ago left the room in tears after not being able to write Fizzbuzz. On a laptop with Visual Studio installed, on their own in a an empty room with nobody looking over their shoulders. The same company said they'd had so many candidate, including university graduates, who simply couldn't code, that they were almost giving up on it.

They do seem to be a bit absurd. I had a nice chuckle though.

I hope not...

Sometimes, aptitude and an ability to learn and grow is more valuable than having specific technology knowledge. It suggests a more generalist take on one's career, which means they are always going to be useful. There's also something to be said for "soft skills" and a person's overall attitude. All this can make the balance for a lack of technical experience, provided they have demonstrated talent an ability to close such gaps.

Other times, the whole hiring process is just completely broken. Your friend may have had to contend with co-workers that were utterly incapable at their jobs.

Marketing... How?

If your client has an HD picture button (like Boost) you need to click it to actually receive the proper image

Haha good try. Hope your interview goes well

for(var i=0;i<=100;i++){ if((i%2)==1) console.log(i); }

btw % is the modulo operator, x%y returns the remainder of division of x by y

for (i%1=0; i+2; int) odd++; cout(3)

Will you give me the position if I answer the problems? 😀

(0..=100).filter(|n| n % 2 == 1).for_each(|n| println!("{n}"))

Clearly yes, as this post outlines, these candidates weren't smart enough to use ChatGPT

The last interviews I wrote the job posting for and conducted, I made it clear we give you a GPT4 subscription for the job so I expect you to demonstrate your ability to use it as a tool during the interview

I don't see shitting on PHP by OP.

Also PHP is shit. Just so you won't be disappointed.