Is there a certification for developers that requires writing code, not choosing answers?

Question

Java

I recently interviewed a candidate, he managed to answer almost all the intricate theoretical questions, he has a bunch of certificates. But when I asked him to write a simple code, the code turned out to be so heavy and illogical that I had to politely bow out despite my brilliant knowledge of the theory. In this regard, the question is - is there a certification in the world that requires real writing of code, and not ticking the boxes?

Answer 1

It's called experience...

Answer 2

Frankly speaking, I doubt that such certification is now possible.
1) The thing is. how people write code is very much dependent on the tools and conditions of writing.
Give a .net developer, for example, who is used to working with resharper - visual studio without a resharper - and he will start looking for external libraries to connect - and possibly write something wrong. About the practice of writing code on a piece of paper for interviews in some companies, I generally keep quiet. Even just looking at the code printed in black and white on a piece of paper is uncomfortable.
A change in the development environment can ruin everything very much - since it takes some time to get used to everything.
2) Bad - good code is a much more subjective concept than is commonly believed.
In general, the ability to write logical and heavy code is less important in my opinion than the ability to follow standards in coding. In the end, it’s not so difficult to accustom to write good code, basically it is written by analogy with what has already been written.
And in general - with a code they don’t go to a beauty exhibition. Good code is code that is low cost to maintain by other developers. And it is more convenient for different developers to support very different code.
In general, the quality of the code, as a rule, does not really depend on the professionalism of the developer, starting from the middle level and above. First of all, it depends on whether he writes the application alone and whether there is a review code. He will always think that the code he writes is good. But as soon as his colleagues get to him, it will be difficult for them to understand him and change him, although he may look beautiful on the outside.
In general, I recommend not to pay such attention to the quality of the code at all - but rather to how he writes the code, what is the course of his thought. 90% of the code in our world is written according to a template already written. It just needs a streamlined development process.

Answer 3

I usually ask to write an integer array sort. And we discuss the resulting version for optimization.
There are a couple more purely language tasks - on anonymous classes and serialization, for example, but they already go into battle after the first paragraph. :)

Answer 4

At one time I was busy with interviews.
One of the requirements for the candidate was to take several code samples with him to the interview, which he considers: the most successful/beautiful/optimal, somehow remarkable for himself.
And if a person answered well to the theory - he knows the principles of OOP, has his own opinion, then you can go over his code, ask questions and listen to the answers.

Answer 5

Look for certificates from the Olympics. The finalists of ACM ICPC or TopCoder will not come to you, but the winners of the regional competitions are what you need.
True, there is one significant drawback here - many good programmers do not even know about these competitions, so it is impossible to put such a "certification" in the minimum requirements.

Answer 6

But in general, it seems to me that the formulation of the question is not entirely correct.
what is the task? To hire a person was it possible just by looking at the resume and scrolling through the list of certificates?
But this is a utopia, sorry.
you still have to interview, and think about whether a person can work in a team, and in what role. there was an article about this
recently

Answer 7

Have you tried Codility ? I really liked it!