Programming task for mentoring/ interviewing developers

Question

Hi,

I was wondering what programming exercises people thought would make good training exercises to get junior developers up to speed.

In the past I have used a DAG (directed acyclic graph) as a programming exercise, as I find this is a really good way to introduce new developers to test first development, OOP and collections.

(This also works as really good interview test)

However, my current crop of junior programmers are coming to the end of the DAG now, but have found the process interesting and would like to continue.

I think it would be nice to choose an exercise that required 2 or 3 simple design patterns, but any/ all ideas are welcome.

I will be doing the exercise in Java, but I think an interesting programming problem would be language agnostic.

cheers,

David.

Answer 1

For interviewing I'd check out the following thread: How to Find that Rock Star Junior Developer?

Answer 2

Pick something from Project Euler

Problem 18 is a particularly good one as it involves recursion and while it can be solved with brute force, it links to Problem 67 which is the same exact task on a much larger data file that cannot be brute forced.

Answer 3

I ask candidates to implement a linked list during interviews.

For Mentoring, I would put them to work on actual code. It feels good to have code out there being used. If there isn't an opening in the current release, have them build "that tool that would be really useful to do X but you haven't had time for to build yet."