Geektastic Reviews 4

I recently had the misfortune of having to carry out a Geektastic coding challenge to prove my .Net programming abilities.

As soon as the interviewer told me I'd have to submit a coding challenge which would be graded by an external party, my spidey senses started tingling but I did not anticipate what was to follow...

As others have stated, the criteria which have to be met are unclear - one of these is headed multithreading. This seems simple enough to determine what is required => async, await and some threading right? WRONG...

The code I submitted had examples of async methods and awaitable tasks as well as some parallel foreach loop processing. I was awarded 1/5 for multithreading, with the only comment being that my Parallel Foreach would not give a performance benefit..... Bear in mind that the task was so simple that threading wasn't even necessary, but it's better to show some knowledge of how to use them right? WRONG again it seems

This is just one example, I also received 1/5 for the Solution Design category despite the use of interfaces, dependency injection and clean architecture principles. I received no review comments to explain why such a low score had been awarded - I would only expect this if I had shoved the whole solution into a single class at worst...

Another thing to note is that I was told by the company I was interviewing for that "Don't worry about finishing it, no one ever does" yet one of the review comments relates to the solution not being completed...

In summary, if a company tells you they use a GeekTastic coding test to gauge your programming abilities, save yourself some time and look elsewhere or fire the assignment through ChatGPT...

I did a programming test on this platform but there are several issues in their methodology:

- In the beginning of the test it is unclear what is expected and what are the scoring criteria (it states you should 'assume' things !?).
- The code review is subjective and review is done on non-objective criteria (ie taste or style)
- Some engineers will work better under time constaints than others, so the test is not really fair in this respect (in a real world situation it is very rare to solve such kind of problem under time constraints)
- It is unclear what are the scoring criteria, therefore the result score is subjective and arbitrary.
- They claim to address feedback but I had zero response to any questions I posted.

Reviewer included incorrect and unfair comments, which cost me the job offer.
He called me out on something the assignment asked explicitly not to do, and dressed it up as a more severe problem with my code.

Fast, professional, and trustworthy!

I've found Geektastic randomly, and by this lucky chance, I was able to land an amazing job at a company I love.

The whole process was quicker than I was able to process. Within a week of learning about Geektastic, I was talking to my current colleagues.

Some coding questions, a coding project, and the result which you can leave an employed person, or use the great feedback to learn from and improve!

Highly recommend!