A cool way of finding a good web developer | Hacker News Reader

A cool way of finding a good web developer

playground.thesedays.com

32 pointsmegamark1644 comments

1.) The person you want to hire is probably going to grate at the use of terms like "ninja" and "monkey", even if you only intended them ironically.

2.) The person you want to hire is probably going to think twice about working with a group who considers viewing HTML source to be a demonstration of one's "ninja-skills".

3.) The person you want to hire probably got bored after 30 seconds and went to go do the http://www.pythonchallenge.com/ instead.

It's not a matter of ensuring that people are good at view sourcing -- it's a matter of filtering out the people who don't even know how to do that.

The viewing of source is only the first step of several.

The viewing of source was every step other than the last one. I have never coded in javascript at all, but their "web developer" trial was trivial even for me.

I recognize this, and that the intention--as mentioned below--is to help out whatever poor sap has to wade through all the resume's coming in.

But, in the context of the present economic zeitgeist, my sympathies go out to the fully qualified guy or gal who is out of work and probably freaking out about it who now not only has to jump through hoops in order to submit a resume but also has to see her career marginalized with terminology like "code ninja" that was already trite five years ago. My sympathies most definitely do not go out to the person actually getting paid to read the resume, on the other hand.

I think that if the person gets bored and wants to be elsewhere, then that is not the person you want to hire :) Though I do agree that those terms are annoying (degrading even). I always thought that a codemonkey was someone who coded only for a living, and often in a disgruntled state:

"An affectionate term for a specific kind of underpaid, overworked (often by volition), increasingly underappreciated indentured servant, otherwise known as a Software Programmer." - Urban Dictionary

I'm not sure what the deal is with all the criticism on here. Yeah, it wasn't all that hard - but that's the point. This is a good test of a basic level of skills one needs these days to be a Web developer (Firebug, parsing HTTP headers, deciphering Javascript, jQuery). And, it was fun.

All the hate reminds me of the quote: "Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting."

So, if you read HN and you were able to get through step 5, congratulations! You're at least an average Web developer.

Can we PLEASE stop using Code + Ninja, Pirate, Monkey, Shaman, Cosmonaut, Santa Claus, etc..

Yes, but not before we all stop trying to suck the fun out of language.

No. It's ok, really. Just consider it another (more interesting) way of saying 'senior' or 'experienced' without implying any kind of age, years-of-experience or (worse) educational-level-completed requirement.

I actually wouldn't mind being called a Code Santa, it sounds pretty awesome actually.

Except, given my coding abilities, I would more resemble Robot Santa from Futurama.

Gave me a chuckle. Code Santa does sound pretty awesome doesn't it?

I wish I'd thought of this for my job listings, it's a fun couple minutes. Well done, gentlemen.

So many of these puzzle challenges (e.g. Google Aptitude Test circa 2004, Facebook Programming Puzzles, etc) seem like they would discourage people who already have a great full time job, or actively maintain an open source project, etc... who are exactly the people you want. This one seems to strike a great balance between time invested and skills/thought process tested.

Really? The skills tested here seem utterly trivial... It was fun for a few minutes, but nowhere near challenging enough to make me sit up and take notice (of course, YMMV)

i don't think they're trying to make something so complex that you are impressed with them (how on earth would they do that?!). it's just fun.

anyway, fo' sure wasted enough of my time. now back to work :)

It is pretty trivial... that was my point. If it weren't trivial, then people would just skip it and move on. But it's cute and still sufficiently non-trivial to be a helpful filter for the person who has to sort through the tide of resumes.

On the other hand, those tests are great for new grads who have ability but not experience and want to stand out in the piles of resumes that these companies receive every day.

It doesn't take a degree to maintain or be an active contributor to an open source project.

They could do with a proof-reading ninja..."forfill": http://bit.ly/forfill

Don't mean to be petty, but that sort of attention to detail is really important as far as I'm concerned.

and web ninja shouldn't be hyphenated... and résumé (or resume), not resumé... spacer gifs are lame... I figured the point was to spot the errors

Let's hope the web-ninja they hire will know that one does not need to put "javascript:" into onclick event handler, or better yet, that this pseudo-protocol should be avoided.

Hmm, the document doesn't even validate: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://playground.theseday...

While the importance XHTML validity is arguable dubious, I would hope that at the very least a company trying to show off its ninja skills to prospective web developers would spend the extra effort.

I hope that by "top shelf" they mean "will be considered at all"... with the exception of the last bit being entirely unrelated to web development, it was all really basic and the solutions should be required knowledge.

"We are These Days, a contemporary communications agency. We create deep relations between brands and their customers.

Not by forcing our foot through the door (you can’t get passed the videophone anyhow these days)."

Emphasis added.

I think that there should have been several more levels or something. Maybe different codes for black belt vs. yellow. Or Sensei vs student. Nice idea for basic skill testing though.

The Flash one was a lot of fun, too bad they aren't in an area I would want to relocate too. If anyone was stuck or curious about the solution my email is on my profile.

Seriously? I was expecting something a little harder...

Hmm... pretty cool, I'm stuck on step 3

That one took me forever, in the end I just had to watch the pipe really closely :-) Don't give up!

A hint is to watch the location bar when you click it.

Just disable Javascript...

...or use curl

DOM Inspector in Firefox does wonders for quickly changing a field's value.

Or you could set a regex in a proxy to replace the value="" in the server response to value="foo" :-)

no easter egg in the source of the last page? oh well.

looks like they need to find one given the state of links on their main index (in Opera at least)

... and how many hoops do you have to jump through before you find out how much the job actually pays?

SHIZZLE this is cool!

down-modders either didn't get that far or they don't like spoilers.

Either that or the down-modders involved have enough of a sense of honor to not post spoilers...