Over the last week I have been interviewing people for a Flash Developer job at my company. This is my first time hiring and it has been an interesting experience.

The first thing that struck me as odd are the number of applicants that didn't come even close to meeting the minimum requirements for the position. The ad said the minimum requirements were 4 years web development experience with 2 years Flash development experience including animation using ActionScript. The ad described the position as a non-design position that will include other development activities as well. Out of 2 dozen or so applicants, only 3 were qualified enough to bother interviewing.

Now it should be said that I'm not a Flash developer, in fact, I've never worked with Flash at all so I was unsure of how to determine if a developer had the experience and ability to do what we need. A portfolio helps, but is not necessarily sufficient to determine coding proficiency.

I am an avid reader of Coding Horror, Jeff Atwoods blog. One of the things that he suggests is administering the FizzBuzz test (the idea seems to have originated from Imran on Tech). I modified the FizzBuzz test a little from the original article, ours went something like this:

Loop 15 times, every 3rd time write Fizz, every 5th time write Buzz, and the 15th time write FizzBuzz.

We also asked the candidate to develop it in the Flash IDE instead of on paper.

When I gave this test to the first candidate, I wasn’t sure what it would prove. It’s such a trivial test that it doesn’t seem like it would prove anything. However, when I watched the candidate perform the test, I learned a number of things about them.

• Familiarity with the development environment
• Understanding of basic computer math concepts
• Confidence in their coding ability
• Interest and willingness in solving problems
• Ability to write clean code

I’m a little hesitant to give complex coding problems during an interview. This isn’t the same type of stress that occurs naturally on the job so I don’t believe that it shows how well they work under pressure. However, since FizzBuzz is so trivial, I didn’t feel bad at all about asking the candidate to do the test on our huge conference room monitor in front of me and my co-interviewer.

If you are interviewing a candidate, I would highly recommend giving this test.