Real world coding challenge

We've done a t-shirt for real world coding challenge. The one you usually get as part of recruitment process. Technical challenge that requires of you to build a small sample microservice preforming some task. We think most of you are familiar with those kind of take at home challenges. We've tried to play with it and illustrate it in a way that both looks cool, and demonstrates how we feel when doing those sort of tasks.
We hope that you'll enjoy our real world code challenge developer tee 😛

Common coding challenges

Whether it is building a stripped version of battleship game that github uses for their recruitment process for enterprise applications engineer role, whether it is building a simple chat application, whether it is a url shortener. There are countless of different real world coding challenges circulating in the wild. What engineering managers and team leads mostly check for in this kind of take at home assignments is do you know how to structure the project according to standard practice. Do you know how to write clean code, do you know how to input validation in order to avoid crashes and generally do you know the language/framework required for the role. You can often help yourself by searching for similar projects on github. There might be some open source solutions that can inspire you. Just be careful not to copy somebody's bad practices.

About T-shirt design

When doing real world coding challenge we often feel as we are programming robots in a factory. We're often solving simple automation tasks. That is the reason why we went with robot as hero for this developer tee. Our robot also has various assembly arms. They are helping him to do the tasks at hand. Same as with any take home assignment, we often use various libraries to help us keep our code clean and to help us speed up the building our solution. Our robot hands symbolise exactly that, using external packages to help us. We've intentionally made our robot cute. He must have the same look and feel as those coding challenges, cute but extremely powerful. Have that feeling... If you know how to do that, you can probably do anything.

Do we need a coding challenge as part of hiring process

Hiring mangers usually don't know how to get the best person for the job. They must assume that that the person applying for the job is trying to oversell. It is really hard to trust the stranger that he has the skills he says he has. That is the main reason why we have technical challenge as part of the hiring process. I mean it feels a bit wierd to have it, especially if you are also doing a references check. If you do references check you can assume person has the required coding skills. On top of that there are plenty of product skills, as well as soft skills that are usually expected from software engineer, but on the other hand are rarely tested. At the same time it is not uncommon to have multiple people fitting the role, technical challenge is one way to further narrow it down and find the best candidate for the job.