Multunus, as you may already know through one of our previous blog post, is our ex-neighbouring company. They hosted a puzzle on their website for skilled programmers looking out for a job. They used this puzzle and the code people sent as a response to this puzzle to analyze how good the potential candidates were. What struck me at that moment is, if I am hiring non-programmer testers, what would they do with such kind of puzzle.
Having my own experience of James Bach and Michael Bolton throwing such puzzles at me and asking me to reverse engineer or figure out the pattern and logic, I thought it is useful I ask my non-programmer testers to analyze the puzzle and see if they can crack it.
I chose Abhishek and Swathi, our relatively new hires and who joined us fresh out of college to deal with it. They had closely worked with me on a project and I believed in their skills. If I did not, they would have been off already. That’s the way it works in Moolya. So, completing one year is unlike completing one year in another company. It is an endorsement that someone has something special that can help us change the future of testing. It also becomes our responsibility to guide them and provide them with opportunities to shape themselves up.
Working on such puzzles during spare time at office hours helps in gaining new skills, learning how to discover information, learning how to investigate, be creative, sharpening existing skills, practice writing experience reports…
Abhishek and Swathi did attack this task in confidence and kept on it well to make a breakthrough. I personally witnessed that they were dedicated and passionate about working on this puzzle. Before you go ahead and read their experience report and analysis, you should try your hands on the puzzle and see if you can crack it – here is the link. (As a side note, if you are a programmer looking for a job, try to write your own code and try your chance to be interviewed by Multunus folks. You can read some interesting stuff about their folks here )
Once you have tried your hands on the puzzle, cracked it or maybe given up being intimidated by it, you may want to read what our own Young turks did. Read Abhishek and Swathi’s experience report of cracking Multunus Twitter Puzzle.
To every person I have hired, I have told, “Your work should inspire the next batch of people joining Moolya” and this work from Abhishek and Swathi definitely is one good inspiration to the next batch of freshers we have hired and the future batches. Kudos to you both. Keep doing work that inspires us.
Many thanks to Multunus for allowing us to publish this report on our blog. Thanks to Akshay, Vaidy and Leena from Multunus for the support and appreciation they had for Abhishek and Swathi. I just hope they keep up the promise of sending T-shirts to those who cracked the puzzle and probably consider to give me one for this post 🙂
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