Today I saw this Tweet:
If you’re hiring an iOS developer, please, for the love of god, don’t do “fetch this API and show a table view with results” task.
— Michał Kałużny (@justMaku) July 24, 2017
It spawned a great discussion on Twitter and thought I’d share my perspective on this.
Although this may seem like a dull exercise to ask an interviewee to do, in my experience I’ve found it to provide a great amount of insight into how the one doing it thinks about solving a problem.
By revieweing this exercise’s deliverable, I can know…
- How they think about data modeling
- Are the models structs or classes?
- How they reason about data flow
- Did they create a manager for the data layer?
- Whose responsability is to download the data and parse it?
- How should changes be bubbled up to the UI?
- How they feel about using dependencies
- Did they use Alamofire to consume the API?
- Did they use a library to parse JSON?
- How they approach API design
- Are closures used intellengtly, or at all, where they would become handy?
- What’s the “no-data” state,
nilor[]?
I could go on.
What’s best, is that many interesting conversations that provide even more useful information can be spun-off from any of those questions above.
In my experience, I’ve found this very exercise to have a different outcome every time I use it to interview someone.