hi.

these days im actively reviewing with companies and all of them send a test project as a part of the evaluation process.

problem is that I know that I have aced the test projects and made them best as possible but most of the time they are rejected without mentioning the reason or with just telling the meaningless reason for example you had to not test your code any ide for making your test but they didn't mention that or you didn't implement many parts of the test but I already read the test carefully and did all of it.

I assume most of the emails are prepared texts and I can say all of them are known companies.

I need to know really what is the reason and what should my approach be?

I know I followed best programming practices and made the test case with no problem. are companies look for something special in test cases or…?

thank you for helping.

That's difficult to say. First and foremost the test needs to work, this is something not every candidate I saw in my career did so far. Second is coding style and programming best practice, maybe you had some faults in there which prevented you from being reviewed anymore?

The third reason to reject candidates is when they copy paste a solution from the web. Companies will find out by simply googling and we had candidates which did that on a russian forum for example, posting our test request and then had the community solve it for them.

I can assume companies don't give detailed feedback because big and well established ones don't have the time to do so. Time is money and employees mostly don't have nay of that, so you get a default email. You also need to realize that for every job offer, there will be a dozen of candidates applying to that, so if a programmer would give all of them a detailed review, the company needs to hire an aiddtional programmer just for reviews

moeen, you cannot expect a prospective employer to give you an explanation of why you didn't get the job. You also cannot expect to be given a satisfying reason for that reality. You have to persevere despite the unfairness.

@Tom Sloper thank you for the reply.

i need to know is this all about appetite or sometimes I make mistakes that are really mistakes and I don't know them.

@Shaarigan maybe one problem is the competition. for example they are testing 100 developers for one position and they just send that automated reply that your test project was really developed badly. is it true?

moeen k said:
they are testing 100 developers for one position and they just send that automated reply that your test project was really developed badly. is it true?

Maybe. We cannot know.

You believe you “aced” all their tests, but you are not the best judge of that.

You have to realize that the world is not designed to provide satisfying explanations for everything.

You just have to keep doing your best.

Without more information, all I can offer is guesses and empty platitudes. Maybe your code is crap. Maybe their process for evaluating your code is crap. Maybe they don't like your coding style. Maybe they are using "programming tests" as a source of free labor and never had any intention of hiring anybody. Maybe they already had someone in mind for the position, and only looked for outside applicants as a formality. Or maybe another applicant just beat you to the punch.

I know that I have aced the test projects and made them best as possible

How do you know? How many high-end game projects have you worked on?

How do you know that your algorithms are the best for the problem, that your comments are clear enough, that your code factoring is clean and separable, and that your use of pointers is all 100% water tight?

If you have a lot of experience, then you should be able to compare to standard in the industry, but if you don't have a lot of previous experience, and/or the experience you have is with smaller, fringe, development studios not attached to the main body of best practices, then you really can't know.

moeen k said:
meaningless reason for example you had to not test your code any ide for making your test but they didn't mention that or you didn't implement many parts of the test but I already read the test carefully and did all of it.

Besides time constraints as explained above, people generally assume that the reader sees what they see without explaining it. This goes both ways. You see that they were not complete in checking, on the other hand you neglected to mention why the test code covered everything as well.

A lot of real world coding is about communicating clearly to the reader how to read the code, and where to find what. Don't assume people will read and study your code deeply first (they don't have the time, and likely will miss important parts if you don't point them out). The structure, and where to find what should be clear by just a single glance. Reading a list of test function names should tell me what tests are done.

This is also what you work. When you open a new piece of code, do you deeply start reading all code, and see all nuances and hidden gems immediately, or do you skim over the code, and based on that decide what you think of the code?

I had friend that asked me for help for one of those tests. He didn't get the job which is fair, since I helped him :-P In any case, he actually did ask the employer why he didn't get the job. The reviewer told him that the code he turned in was by far the fastest running of all code from the various candidates. He also said he was one of only 3 candidates where the code solved the problem perfectly. ….. however ….. Apparently the reviewer didn't understand the code at all. We had used a finite state machine with a table function pointers to solve it, and it just wasn't what was expected. My general impression is that some companies are looking for “modern” C++ programmers. On the other hand I've had students tell me they were asked if they were “afraid of pointers” and were under the impression that they would have to work on an old code base. I might try to get a feel for what a company is looking for before taking their test.