Thread: Interview Question

Hello,
I hope some of you can help us make a decision and break a deadlock. We've been interviewing a candidate for a developer/sr. developer position and he's been doing very well. He was then asked to write a sample program, which was reviewed by a developer, who gave the candidate a very bad assessment (you can see his comment below). That caught us by surprise, since the candidate has an impressive resume and the interview process was going very well, so we asked a second developer to review the code and he came back with a positive assessment.
Can any of you weigh-in on the matter and help us make a decision. Thank you.


Requirements:

Write a command line app that takes 2 parameters, city and state, and then outputs latitude and longitude (extracted from Google Maps).

Reviewer 1:

- Source demonstrated very poor coding practices:
1) non-modular, very "spaghetti" like code
2) orphaned code in a primary project;
3) no comments;
4) non-descriptive variable names (i, s, x, in).
5) poor coding practices, especially for a team environment.
- Very poor performing source. Use of DomBuilder and DOM factories causes extreme overhead. No use of parsing primitives for performance yields resource requirements easily 10x of what should have been used.
- Candidate is a Junior-MidGrade coder that would do best on a very large team where his roles would include code-like duties but nothing related to actual source.
- high performance code would most likely suffer significantly if similar code was used in that project

Reviewer 2:

- no significant problems were found in the code. Based on the code provided and the positive interview feedback, the candidate should be considered for a developer/sr. developer position.

The Code:

import java.io.*;
import java.net.*;
 
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
 
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.Element;
import org.w3c.dom.Node;
import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;
import org.xml.sax.InputSource;
 
 
 class Finder {
 
	/**
	 * @param args
	 * @throws IOException 
	 */
	public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException 
	{
		if (args.length < 2)
		{
			System.out.print("Not enough parameters");
			return;
		}
		else
		{
			System.out.println("City = " + args[0]);
			System.out.println("State = " + args[1]);
		}
 
		String s = "http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/xml?address=" + 
				   args[0]+ " " + args[1] + "&sensor=false";
 
		s = s.replaceAll(" ", "+");
	    //s =  URLEncoder.encode(s, "UTF-8");
 
		URL theurl = new URL(s);
      URLConnection uc = theurl.openConnection();
 
      BufferedReader in = null;
      in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(uc.getInputStream()));
 
		String inputLine;
		StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
 
		while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null)
		{
            sb.append(inputLine);
		}
		in.close();
 
		parseReturn(sb.toString());
	}
 
	private static String getTagValue(String sTag, Element eElement) 
	{
		NodeList nlList = eElement.getElementsByTagName(sTag).item(0).getChildNodes();
	   Node nValue = (Node) nlList.item(0);
		return nValue.getNodeValue();
	 }
 
	private static void parseReturn(String xml)
	{
		DocumentBuilderFactory dbFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
		try
		{
			DocumentBuilder dBuilder = dbFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
			Document doc = dBuilder.parse(new InputSource(new StringReader(xml)));
			doc.getDocumentElement().normalize();
 
			NodeList nList = doc.getElementsByTagName("geometry");
 
			for (int x = 0; x < nList.getLength(); x++) 
			{
			   Node nNode = nList.item(x);
 
			   if (nNode.getNodeType() == Node.ELEMENT_NODE) 
			   {
					Element geoElement = (Element) nNode;
 
					System.out.println("Longitude = " + getTagValue("lng", geoElement));
					System.out.println("Latitude = " + getTagValue("lat", geoElement));
					break;
			   }
			}
 
		}
		catch(Exception e)
		{
			return;
		}
	}
 
}

I do not have experience,but not writting a single comment is a disadvantage for sure.This also should be in great consider "would include code-like duties but nothing related to actual source.
- high performance code would most likely suffer significantly if similar code was used in that project "
Also the 4 point,for variables is also a disadvantage.However an experienced develop could judge all this,not me.

An interested(i think) idea is to show the candidate the complaints of the one developer and let him justified.An interested² idea is to have the develop that wrote the 'bad for the candidate' report in contact with the candidate in order to letting the candidate explain why he did so.

Review of reviewer 1:
1 & 2: agreed, somewhat.
3: agreed harshly. No excuse for lack of comments, especially in a group environment.
4: as far as the string named s, ok a better name could have been used. As far as x being used as the index in a for loop, reviewer 1 should not have listed that...
5: this whole line is just a recap of 1-4.
My opinion:
I get the impression reviewer 1 has unknown-to-the-public reasons to be so harsh on the author of the code.

Review of reviewer 2:
Nothing specific was said about the code, where there was plenty to be said.
My opinion:
Comments like that of reviewer 2 are the type comment a friend would say about a friend, or a stranger could be paid to say. It promotes the idea of hiring the author for the job without sticking reviewer 2's neck out too far.

Review of the code itself:
1)No comments
2)Access modifier missing for class definition
3)Poor class name for the purpose of the class
4)Although there is a javadoc line that says @param args and @throws IOException, this can not be counted, as it says nothing about what the args are for, or anything useful at all.
5)The string "Not enough parameters" could have been more elaborate to the problem.
6)I am not overly impressed with the code in the catch block.
My opinion on the code:
The code demonstrates the author's ability to get the job done. As far as the DOM, not my area of experise either, but if there is a better way known to reviewer 1 and/or your company, introduce it to the author and get another code sample. In my opinion of the author, he/she demonstrated the ability to get it done with what is in his/her head. If he/she demonstrates the ability to pick up on your company's local ways, and adapt both himself/herself as well as the company to better ways, I say you have found yourself a worthy candidate. I wouldn't expect to find a perfect page of code from anyone applying for a position in a new company.