A real iOS interview assignment

How to find your next iOS hacker

We’ve all been there. Phone interviews, white board coding and weird guesstimates. They all validate something I guess, but my favourite is the take home project. The interviewee gets a small project to finish at home in a few hours and submits the code. It’s straightforward and easy to grasp, but the projects are all pretty much the same.

“Use an API to fetch list of X, parse, persist to disk and present in a UITableView.” That basically describes all my iOS assignments. Sure it’s a common task — fetch data from API and present—but does it really give a good picture of an interviewee?

The above example is good for basic knowledge and code structure. But I want to look for certain skills. Memory management. Instruments habit. Retain cycles. Runtime skillz. Debugging. Responsiveness. GCD.

I decided to set up a Xcode project with a working iOS app but filled with glitches and problems. From small to more advanced issues and hidden traps — I want the subject to really show his/her potential. Setting up a GitHub repo and letting the subject commit code in chunks along the way, let’s you see how they work.

If you’re interested in the Xcode project or have any cool ideas, let me know ☺

What’s the interview process like at your company?
What was your best experience as an interviewee?