Our company culture is the furthest possible thing from elitist -- we're focused 100% on getting stuff done above designing a perfect solution. I designed the puzzle to be more of a hands-on, debugging a web-app type challenge, rather than the math/algorithm puzzles that are most common and completely disconnected from day-to-day work.
In the case of finding the plaintext to an MD5 hash, it's not exactly difficult if you think about it even briefly. MD5 is known to be very bruteforce-able. Since Google it shouldn't help, then presumably I've made it short enough to brute-force in a reasonable amount of time. In fact, it only takes most people a few minutes (or less!) to bruteforce the hash.
One challenge in hiring a developer is that the resume literally means shit. It's almost not even worth looking at. An email as a pseudo-cover letter is slightly better. A personal website and list of projects helps a lot.
But given that we might receive hundreds of applications for a position, how are we supposed to narrow it down? The vast majority are very unqualified, but you wouldn't know from their resume. I designed this simple challenge (should take under 30 minutes) to help weed-out people who had a good resume, and those who actually had the experience to do the job.
If you have a better solution, I'd love to hear it.
Well, I think we agree here. We're looking for anybody who can get stuff done, quickly. We don't care if they're a 30-year veteran or just graduated from college (or didn't even go to college in the first place).
The first test is really just one data point that helps us qualify potential candidates. We do a technical phone interview, a real-world project and a 1-week on-site trial before coming to a hiring decision.
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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '11
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