I’ve taken and marked a lot of programming tests in the past. I love doing them as it’s always good to see what challenges different programmers have come up with when designing them. Unfortunately, however, most of them aren’t very good. Below is a list of general ideas to help increase the quality of programmer tests.1. Keep it relevantToo many of the tests have questions on content that simply isn’t relevant to the job. The whole idea behind a programming test is making sure the candidate is competent enough to fulfill the role. It shouldn’t be asking ques...

Everyone who's been programming professionally for a while knows the standard format of the technical interview. You go in, there's a whiteboard in the room, and you write code on it to answer questions.Everyone also has the same basic complaints about these interviews. In a normal work environment, you have access to an API or search engine, but at a whiteboard you don't. Whiteboard questions generally don't include much in the way of overall design, and they're typically limited to simple algorithms, so they don't really test all of a candidate's skills. And let's be honest, programmers tend...