You have to bear in mind that this story happened in 1999, more than a year before the dot com bubble burst; senseless hiring of people was considered perfectly normal at that time.

I was working for a well-known consumer electronics company, developing mobile phones. Our CEO had a problem. The problem — which is not so uncommon among CEOs — was that the investors weren’t happy because the company didn’t sell enough handsets. So the boss went to sales and they claimed they couldn’t sell more because the development guys didn’t give them enough cool products — products the customers reeeeeelly wanted and even if they did, they’d finish too late; that is, they’d come out with a phone in March, missing the Christmas sales season by threeeeee month.

So our boss went to the development manager to find out what the problem was; our development manager told him what almost every development manager tells in such a situation: “We could develop soooooo many cool products in sooooooo little time, if we only had moooooore developers!”

This procedure repeated a couple of times until our CEO freaked out. He went to our human resources manager and commanded him to “get more software developers, no matter what!”

Our HR manager didn’t know much about hiring software developers, but he surely had a plan: he wanted to hire 100 software developers in 100 days. He had t-shirts printed, carrying these words:

[company]
100
in
100
Do YOU have good
soft(ware) skills?

Our job was to wear these (poor quality) t-shirts and attract potential software developers for our team.

This strategy was unbelievably stupid for many reasons. First, it emphasizes quantity, not quality. Second, it reads as if soft skills were more important than software skills. Last, it is very offending as it is based on the idea that good software developers stupidly fall prey to such bad HR campaigns.

Anyway, we got lots of candidates — many more than we could interview; our HR manager celebrated a victory. We, however, had to separate the wheat from the chaff and thus we developed programming tests that every candidate had to take.

One of the most successful questions was this one:

Write a routine that sorts an array of ‘n’ integers; write best-quality code.

Innocuously as it looks, this question has several good characteristics: it requires the candidate to actually write real code; since it has to be ‘best-quality code’ you can find out about his/her skills and quality standards. For instance, does the candidate

– pay attention to style issues (indentation, layout and consistency in general)?
– choose meaningful identifier names?
– write (good) comments?
– use assertions and/or checks for boundary cases?

This question can reveal even more: since no programming language is given, you can find out about a candidate’s favorite programming language. But most importantly, you can find out if a developer is smart and has a questioning attitude.

Every smart developer knows that there is no perfect sorting algorithm. The choice depends on many constraints — constraints that are not given in the problem statement and hence must be investigated. I remember one applicant commented along these lines:

[…] It all depends on how big ‘n’ is and whether we have write access to the array (that is, we can sort in-place). Are there any code/RAM restrictions? Depending on factors like these I would choose the best sorting algorithm from a text book. Unless no further information is given, I would use the sorting algorithm that comes with the standard library (e. g. qsort() in C, java.util.Arrays.sort() in Java). Since I know that you want me to write some code, I’ll implement an insertion sort algorithm which is easy to code and its O(n^2) behavior is acceptable for ‘n’ < 1000 [...]

Naturally, we made an offer to him, which he turned down a couple of days later. I guess he was scared of having to work with too many soft skills experts.