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Comment by gstar | Hacker News Reader

We've been doing this at EDITD for a while too:

(for example)

I like your zmqrpc idea. I had a very similar RPC/MQ-combination running for a while, using RabbitMQ instead of 0mq, Ruby instead of Python and JSON instead of BSON (switched to bencode later for better binary data support). But other than that it was pretty much the same mechanism.

edit: Your "Join the Team" page has an opening titled "Internships: Fashion Design, Journalism, Software & Statistics" but then in the description it's unfortunately only for "Fashion Design, Graphic Design, Statistics or Journalism".

Kudos to whoever set up this box, by the way. I ran nmap against it a few different ways and the correct port number was not listed.

The reason (as pointed out by zeraholladay) is that nmap scans per default only about ~1000 ports. If the service is running on a non standard port it will not show up in the default scan

I ran it with the widest port range possible.

Deleted comment

Noooo! Don't give away the keys to the kingdom. :)

Instead, maybe say "no ping scan".

On the other hand, if you're aware of nmap and know how to use it to get past the first hurdle, you're probably more than capable of solving the actual challenge.

Sorry, my bad. Deleted the post.

Really? (I'm being slightly sarcastic...)

I spent a couple of hours on this late one evening a few months ago, delightedly fired off my details, and - never heard anything back.

I'm still pleased that I actually jumped through all the hoops, but the utter silence from the other end? Not sporting at all.

Strange. No email in your profile, drop me one at geoff@editd.com and I'll see what happened.

This is great. I'll be keeping this entire thread in mind if I find myself looking for a job.

Is the purpose mainly just to prevent spam / completely unqualified candidates? Its rather trivial to do the post for anyone with dev experience so I can't imagine its much use to actually gauge their skills

That's what we thought too - this was the definite first pass, and we always intended to have a challenge/response type question for extra credit.

But we didn't need it - it turns out the kind of people that are intrigued enough to apply, and have enough ability to install a few libraries are likely great people.

awesome, well I plan on searching for companies that advertise jobs this way, seems like a great way then to get their attention

FizzBuzz is trivial, but there's a reason why it is used so often; the half-foot high fence keeps out 100% of people too stupid to step over it.

I thought employers generally gave FizzBuzz during an in-person interview. Surely a 5 minute phone call from a halfway technical interviewer could provide a way better filter than FizzBuzz, and avoid wasted time by having woefully unqualified people come into the office.

There are lots of filters, if I ever end up in a hiring role I intend to make use of several. Someone may be able to talk the jargon well enough during a 5 minute phone call but I think they should always be asked to write code at the in-person interview stage, and if they can't do FizzBuzz when they're being hired to program it doesn't matter what magic they weaved during the call.

I've done a fair amount of resume screening and it's definitely useful to be able to filter out the obviously unqualified or uninterested candidates.

I checked out the EDITD test and it's a little more involved than Parse's.

I have no idea what port "EDITD" is. Is that supposed to be trivial?

There is a hint on the page - IA is the standard HTTP port

OK, thanks. I got it now (though personally I don't find it very interesting).

How has it been working for you? Has it increased the overall quality of your applicants?

Incredibly - applicants through this vector are about 99% quality.

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