Any good ideas on how to work out if someone is going to be good at programming?
We’re wanting to hire someone as an understudy and send them on courses etc. to become a technical programmer under the conditions that they then commit to working for us for a while afterwards, but don’t want to even start down that road with someone who won’t be capable.
I’ve thought of perhaps something like that old game Logo with the tortoise - getting them to try draw something that I give them on graph paper using simple instructions. There was also a cool game where you had to get the robot to turn on and off lights by giving him a program to run. I wish I could find more stuff like that…
Here’s something similar to the bot you mentioned: https://lightbot.com/
(My connection to it is timing out at the moment, so may not be a valid choice)
However, from what I was reading, some people consider programming to be a learned skill, and having an aptitude for it is irrelevant. Your miles may vary.
http://lightbot.com/flash.html
That works for me - well done on finding that game. I remember it being good fun, but also testing programming concepts like functions and loops.
Ideally I’d like people who enjoy the coding rather than it’s something they’ve learned in order to earn.