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i'm looking for the best way to test a candidate for a position of flex programmer with a pracitical\interactive test in front of a computer 45-60 minutes test. need to test flex basic knowledge, abillity to solve UI programming challenges and maybe some flex mobile. any ideas?

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I have no clue about flex, but Fizzbuzz (codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmers-program.html) can be done in almost any language. If they solve it, should be easy to ask them adding some UI for it. –  Doc Brown Jan 19 '12 at 13:02
Is this flex the lexical analyzer, or flex the adobe web app framework? Note that the lexer predates the framework, but google searches for flex come up with adobe first.... –  Spencer Rathbun Jan 19 '12 at 15:08
@Spencer: do you think the OP was talking about "UI programming challenges" in context of "flex the lexical analyzer" ;-) ? –  Doc Brown Jan 19 '12 at 17:07
@DocBrown Most of my users hate having a command line interface to the magical parsers I create for them. A UI is more work, and that's not in the budget. Mostly though, it just irritates me to see adobe co-opt the name. :) –  Spencer Rathbun Jan 19 '12 at 18:05

2 Answers 2

Take a recent coding problem you've had and see if they can solve it. You may have an example of a code piece that had to be corrected - see if they can find the flaw.

Even if you have no code at all, you should have some idea of what you want them to do. Put them in front of the computer and let them do their thing, Watch, take notes, ask questions, have them explain their madness. If this is what they want to do for a living, they can't be shy about it.

Many devs feel certifications are a waste, so why have candidates do some sort of similar test?

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I'd suggest authoring your own test, so you can be sure that the candidate has the knowledge in the areas you expect to be using.

If I were writing the test, I'd want to make sure they understand data binding and at least one of the Flex MVC frameworks, as well as how to implement Flex components, including item renderers.

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