Code interviews for a PHP developer roles

I write a lot of PHP for part of my job.

The beauty of PHP is that for any given task, there are always multiple ways to do it, all of which are wrong.

Any sufficiently skilled developer has a bunch of things they hate about the language they use the most, and are happy to tell you about it.
This is a characteristic I unironically keep an eye out for when hiring.

"Introductions and a bit of smalltalk" - I would shit myself if an interviewer started asking about smalltalk... /s

The fuck kind of programming language is "smalltalk"?
- It inspired python's syntax iirc

I used to work at a company that used XSLT. They know that it's an obscure language that probably none of the potential candidates have ever worked with. But it's easy enough to learn the basics in an hour or two.

So the entry test was to strip some tags from an XML file. You had a day or two (maybe more) to do it. My solution wasn't ideal, I didn't use several of the shortcuts available in the language. But at least it did what it was supposed to.

A few weeks after I had started working there my boss came up to me, visibly frustrated and asked me whether the test was too hard. Thinking back on my problems I replied that maybe having the desired output ready so that you could test your own solution against it might be nice. But my boss's problem was that none of the last 5 candidates could even send in a solution that would run.

You had so much time, and running an XSLT script is really easy and takes no time at all. And for some inane reason these people couldn't even manage to test their code and still decided to send it in.

And I thought I was an idiot when I didn't know if it was spelled grey or gray in CSS during the in-person interview.

It is very good test for the ability to research, I think. The amount of people who painstakingly went through some video tutorial on PHP and are now developers is insane. I'm sure there's place in the market for them (writing Wordpress themes/plugins, for example), but it's hard to find a programmer with ability to think these days. Not because people are more stupid, but because every other person is a programmer now.
I would just use #888888 anyway, but which way is it spelled, out of interest?
- I wanted to answer "grey", full of confidence. Then I decided to look it up to be sure and found out that it's "gray".
  The test was to spot mistakes in a simple html file. So I couldn't substitute anything. And my favourite gray color is #666.

Oh geez, I'm one of those people who can't code on paper. I was applying for something ages ago and I went in for a programming test and they handed me a paper test and my mind completely shut down. Put me in front a computer and I have no issues at all... It was embarrassing.

I would just write down the steps I would take, just some psudocode. It doesn't have to work, it just has to make sense in the style of the language you're talking about.

import random library import any GUI/display libraries required for the outcome desired build array of integers [1..52] (or 0..51 if you're being fancy) for loop 1..1000 select random number A 1..52 (or 0..51 if you used that above) select random number B 1..52 (or 0..51 if you used that above) swap elements in the array A and B pop first two elements from array decode at display time what the two numbers represent in terms of playing cards
If the test requires more than that, then they're crazy. The syntax doesn't matter, just that you can logic yourself through the problem.
You can use the IDE, google, or whatever to fill in the specifics. If you wanted me to do that in literally any programming language, once the psudocode is done, you just spend an hour or so looking up the details.

great and hilarious post, but isn't this programming_horror instead of a linuxmemes

Still in university, never did an interview. Is that seriously the avarage difficulty of interview questions?

This is on the easier end of the scale to be sure, but as someone who's interviewed candidates with similar questions, it eliminates a surprising number of people...
My theory is that modern coding bootcamps stuff their students full of buzzwords instead of letting them learn the basics
When I interview people, I don't care how they get an answer, I want to see that they can get to the answer, ideally the correct one, but it doesn't matter if it's wrong. I want them to show me their problem solving skills and that they understand their own solution.
If you can read existing code and understand complexities you are already better than 80% of these hires.
You might get something harder after that. But there's a reason one of the most common code interview questions is FizzBuzz. There's a shocking number of applicants that can't do it.
That's like stage one where you filter out the obviously incompetent ones.
You wouldn't believe how many candidates with years of experience can't figure out those simple problems. Or even the super well known fizzbuzz.
It's insane, people will claim like 2-3 years of experience with Ansible, they can't even get a file copied. Couple years of Python, they don't understand async, generators and other pretty basic features.
People have always been lying a bit about their experience but it's getting way, way out of control.

Only PHP programmers post something like this as an image! 😘

I feel fortunate that the image is fried and I can't read it.

I once knew a "developer" with 20 years of "experience" who could not write a foreach loop by hand

Some people are really good at bullshitting their way through life

I jump between languages so much I can never remember the structure.
for item in items? Or item of items or items as item?
Best to just have the IDE auto complete it.

Want to print out all odd numbers from 1 to 100? Easy:

for(_=[];_<+!![]+""+[]*[]+[]*[];_++)(_%+(!![]+!![])?console.log(_):[]);

Actually, I prefer this one: for(_=[];_<+!![]+""+[]*[]+[]*[];_++%+(!![]+!![])?[]:console.log(_));
- Or this one without the "undefined" when run in a browser console:
  for(_=[];_<+!![]+""+[]*[]+[]*[]-!![]-!![];_++%+(!![]+!![])?[]:console.log(_));_+!![]

Not one person in the comments has attempted to answer any of the questions either.

for (i%1=0; i+2; int) odd++; cout(3)
Haha good try. Hope your interview goes well
for(var i=0;i<=100;i++){ if((i%2)==1) console.log(i); }
btw % is the modulo operator, x%y returns the remainder of division of x by y

This actually gives me some confidence in my programming skill level.

I was thinking the same thing. I mean, I just did a coding test for a potential job, and I know I did at least as good as, and likely better than this.
edit: just to prove to myself, I went ahead and wrote the program without looking things up. I'm self-taught so I feel pretty proud. It took about 25 mins, and it works!

I don't believe these are genuine interview answers.

The previous candidate to me at a job a few years ago left the room in tears after not being able to write Fizzbuzz. On a laptop with Visual Studio installed, on their own in a an empty room with nobody looking over their shoulders. The same company said they'd had so many candidate, including university graduates, who simply couldn't code, that they were almost giving up on it.
- Suddenly I feel like a fucking accomplished programmer, despite only doing some questionable stuff on Godot lately, but never messing up my loops... Not too badly anymore, anyway.
  A fizzbuzz type of question I know I would mess up on the modulo operator. I know the logic is if the division of the current_number by 3 has a remainder of zero, write fizz, but I always look up the operator

You can tell this is fake because the code interview actually tests basic knowledge instead of giving you 13 minutes to create a templated polymorphic class which accepts arbitrary flatbuffer arguments and implements factory pattern constructors written in Haskell, with the end goal of recursively sorting nanoparticles by bond strength. Intro level position, $8/hr, must supply your own MacBook.

These are the "developers" that will be replaced by AI lol

I hope these aren't real. I, and most people here, could probably write these codes top to bottom on paper without an eraser or strikethrough parts because we have it fully solved before the interviewer finished the sentence.

I mean, it's a hard problem to solve if you never worked with moduli before.
- Shouldn't people familiar with integer arithmetic should be able to struggle to something like x == 2 * (x/2) to test if it is odd or even? Or just bitwise x & 1?
- Sure, programming is hard if you've never worked with programming language features before... Modulus isn't some obscure esoteric operator, it's literally CS 101

I knew a dude who got a job for a programming language he never wrote. Not only that, the guy was hired to be the experienced / lead programmer to give guidance on how to use the language. In fact, I knew multiple people like this. Some were actual programmers and good at other programming languages, but some had decided it was time to switch from another field (geology, marketing, database engineer, ...).

It's still puzzling how they got their jobs.

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