I don't even remember how sophisticated the querying had to be - I think it was something like:
- find and display all movies by the specified year
- substring text searches in the title
Maybe one other. But it wasn't even approaching anything really sophisticated. We just wanted to see that people could write a basic logic flow, read-and-write data application.
Then for the people who did finish it, we looked at the code. Was it well commented, well thought out, did it have error handling (what if the input file doesn't exist? What if something eats your data file while it's running?), what assumptions did they make.
So the base test was basically a sniff test - if you can't do this, you're not a good enough developer to work here. If you can do it, we'll look at the quality of the result to assess how senior you are.
- find and display all movies by the specified year
- substring text searches in the title
Maybe one other. But it wasn't even approaching anything really sophisticated. We just wanted to see that people could write a basic logic flow, read-and-write data application.
Then for the people who did finish it, we looked at the code. Was it well commented, well thought out, did it have error handling (what if the input file doesn't exist? What if something eats your data file while it's running?), what assumptions did they make.
So the base test was basically a sniff test - if you can't do this, you're not a good enough developer to work here. If you can do it, we'll look at the quality of the result to assess how senior you are.