How can I vet a MOBILE eng without being one myself for a startup job? Such as take home assignment
I’m working on a startup with me friend but I am a Data Scientist and he’s a backend software engineer (builds data transformation pipelines primarily). My friend had some web experience but no mobile experience at all, and I’m not an engineer, I just work with data once it already exists. We’re hiring a mobile engineer for our startup as a contractor job (paid in cash not equity) and have narrowed down to a few candidates. We’ve already interviewed them for fit, checked out their portfolios, and my backend cofounder asked a few technical questions in the interviews. As the last step to help us differentiate them and choose the best contractor, we want to do a small technical challenge for them to prove their qualifications. However, neither of us have that expertise (react native or mobile eng). Any advise on how we can figure out the best assignment to give? It should be just 1-3 hours, nothing too time consuming. Thanks in advance!
Web dev is mobile dev these days. Cut me some equity and I'll join.
You must be the one using cookie tracking for mobile apps 😂😂
Oh God, you're gonna Xamafy their Xamaapp and make it cross Xamaplatform, aren't you? And then it won't work in half the cases :(
One possibility would be to leverage your network to find an experienced (and overqualified) mobile dev who would be willing to consult with you for a couple of hours to spec the test and vet the code.
Are you going to create native iOS and Android apps? If not, you could just hire a web developer to use react native.
*ahem* react native IS native iOS and native Android
Not really- RN Android is a year behind RN iOS and both are behind actual native. RN uses native views, but it doesn't use new apis with other libraries that well. So it depends on what this app does. It could be a great fit for react native, or it could be yet another cross Platform app that works equally poorly on all platforms
Seriously if you saw their portfolio, why are you making them do an assignment? I won't do no stinking assignment for free. With that said, I would pick one who agrees to an agile approach, daily releases, uses git, writes automated tests and cares about design.
One idea I had was to have them build a simple mobile app that just calls one specific endpoint of the backend API (we’ve already built) and displays some basic data that responds to a user input on the front-end (like a slider). Thoughts?
This is good enough. It won't take a long time to accomplish. Do you also want to specify how the UI should look (asides from having a slider) or is that up to the mobile dev?
That’s a great question, they actually already know the UI because we created wireframes and showed them to talk about the workload/estimate hours for the project. I think I would provide one screen from Figma and let them use that for the technical challenge.