I am looking for community guidance on how to best interview candidates whenever you are looking for Foundry Developers. I know their are the typical interviewing co-development tools like Coderbyte but has anyone come up with something specific to Foundry?
Would love to be able to define an example problem and have the candidate work through it in a Foundry instance. I would imagine there are a lot of access controls that need to be set up to do something like this and I plan on heading down that rabbit hole but wanted to check with everyone first.
We’ve got the access controls all sorted out for exactly this sort of thing and could support hands-on interview questions. You’ve got my email if you want to discuss that more.
For questions, a couple things to keep in mind for anyone who wants to do this:
Compared to more typical coding interview questions, there’s usually more time required to get situated in Foundry. In contrast to writing an algorithm or whiteboarding a solution, most tasks in Foundry will span multiple apps, which you should take into account when budgeting time for interviews.
That said, whether someone can use Foundry efficiently is a good indicator of overall skill.
Concretely, I would avoid requiring interviewees to work with more than two datasets or more than two or three object types. It just takes a while to digest all the available information.
If you wanted to evaluate a data engineer, a hands-on test I might suggest is something along the lines of:
Create a connection to a source system (e.g. S3 or a data warehouse). Create syncs for two datasets. Set up ingest schedules.
Use Python to parse and clean one and Pipeline Builder for the other. The latter could be a raw json file or something like that. Make sure the pipeline has just enough stages so the candidate can create a connecting build schedule.
Add data expectations
Create two object types that are linked
Build a simple dashboard in Contour using materialized datasets from those object types
Lots of variations on this, but that’s a decent starting point in my opinion.