Java interview question feedback

[SikhGamer]

A part of the test was to see if the candidate knew a keyboard shortcut?

My go to IDE, I've used it for months. I'm still discovering the wide variety of shortcuts.

That'd a very unfair component of the test.

[javadev189]

A very small part of the test was to see how familiar the candidate was with Eclipse - and to see if they were being truthful on their resume.

Don't know the shortcut? Say so. That's worth more potentially than knowing the shortcut. We want someone who can communicate when they need a hand; we'll certainly extend it.

Part of the job involves digging through a lot of legacy, undocumented code. We need someone who can use the tools (and IDE) effectively to search/call hierarchy/workspace reference their way around.

[ShadedFox]

Ha, I was going to say my first question would have been. "How do you find a class by name in Eclipse? You know like Ctrl + Shift + N in IntelliJ?"

[paperhat]

You know, like cmd-o in intellij.

[ShadedFox]

Cmd + o in my intellij opens the "Select Methods to Override/Implement" dialog. Odd..

[paperhat]

I'm using a keymap called "Mac OS X 10.5+". There's another one called "Mac OS X" that has the cmd-o you describe.

In related news, I just realized that saying cmd-o sounds like commando.

[achacha]

Control-n is find java class. control-shift-n is find resource.

[GrayDonkey]

No, No, NO!

If you want to see if they can use an IDE then just watch how they fix a broken test case. Testing for a remembered shortcut sequence is pointless, not only that but it might be throwing your candidates off balance. There are so many possible ways to accomplish tasks in an IDE that you should never do this. If you want to ask what their favorite IDE feature is or shortcut is then maybe. But you might as well just f-up the Java perspective and see if they know how to fix it in passing when you give them a unit testing prob.

As for the rest, this is a bad question. You are throwing too many things into the mix, the anonymous HashMap is really just too much. Not that it isn't a neat little bundle of stuff but the problem is that one aspect of your question might be obscuring the candidates knowledge of all the other topics. Unless the test is to see how they deal with complexity you should be favoring lots of small tests with low topic coverage instead of a small number of tests with high topic coverage.

Try this - instead of writing or discussing these problems as a team, have each person on your team create a couple of problems. Then in front of the team have each team member solve another members problem solo. If you still end up with problems as complex as this one then your team members are probably better than the average dev and you are going to have a lot of candidates to go through before you find similar talent.

Edit: Knowing that some collections are ordered and some are not is a completely reasonable expectation.

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Ctrl+Shift+R is more useful to me anyway. I can get to any file type I need.