Ask HN: Are my technical interview questions too hard?
Our funnel was 150 applications -> 75 potentially viable applicants -> 20 interviews -> 8 finalists.
I thought all 8 finalists would breeze through my technical interview but, in reality, 6 of them completely failed it. I'm trying to determine if I'm just horrible at sniffing out bad programmers or if my questions were too hard, bad, or both.
The format was a 1 hour in-person interview using a pre-setup JSFiddle to perform the following tasks. (I made it clear that asking me questions, using Google, using libraries like jQuery, or whatever else you'd do during a real-world scenario was perfectly fine). In the comments below I added details about why I asked certain questions and what I was looking for.
1) Create a 25x25 red circle using HTML/CSS
2) Place a matching green circle next to it.
3) Now make 10 balls in the HTML instead of 2.
4) Using CSS, make their colors alternate between red and green.
5) Empty the HTML pane and re-create the balls using JavaScript.
6) Now make it a 10x10 grid of balls.
7) Switch the direction of the stripes (from vertical to horizontal usually).
8) After a delay of 1 second, animate all of the balls' color to black using jQuery's animate function.
9) Now, instead of them all animating at once, animate them one by one.
10) Read the documentation for async.js' eachLimit function and use it to animate the balls to black 3 at a time and then once they're all finished, animate them all to blue.
11) Write your own eachLimit function that matches the signature of async.js' and use it to do the same task.
Most candidates were struggling by task 9. Only the 2 we hired were able to complete all 11 tasks.