Why is Tonka Source presenting Speedster, an Entry Level .Net (C#) developer?

Speedster was introduced to Tonka Source via a mutual acquaintance and was presented as one of the top graduating students in his class.

After our assessment, we concluded that is an accurate statement.

Speedster was given a custom made coding challenge by Tonka Source and nailed it, he also nailed the in person interview.

How did Speedster ‘nail’ the coding challenge?

We gave Speedster a coding challenge that exposed him to subjects he had never been taught in his studies.  Such as Git, Pull Requests, Forking,  Behavior Driven Development, MSTest, and .Net Extensions.

During the code review, we asked Speedster to refactor an internal class to use .Net Extensions.  That’s all the instruction we gave him, within an hour he pushed his code to our git repo and created another pull request (code review).

Speedster exceeded our expectations, to the point we decided to confirm he actually wrote the code.  We concluded he did.

Why did Speedster ‘nail’ the in person interview?

We believe there are numerous developer ‘personas’.  Speedster is the persona we look for in entry level candidates.   There are those developers who become developers because it pays well, then there are those people who become developers because they love tech and they love coding and they love solving problems.

Speedster is the latter.

For example, for a class assignment, he found a topic he has a personal passion for, created and hosted his own lap in his home and continues to support and enhance this application, even though the project has ended and he received his grade.