2y
Hi - I'm really sorry that you didn't enjoy the application process. However, there are a couple of misconceptions here that I'd like to address. Firstly, we don't state that no programming experience is needed - we simply say that not very much is needed. We recommend a minimum of around 25 hours of coding experience before applying. We assess all applicants in relation to their experience, so a relative beginner in coding doesn't need to do as well on our tests or in our interviews as someone with much more experience. For our entry-level roles, we frequently hire candidates who have less then fifty hours of coding experience when they apply (as well as much more experienced candidates too).
Secondly, we use Ruby in some of our interview tests for a reason, namely that we want to see how candidates fare with an unfamiliar language rather than one they know well - and very few candidates know Ruby. The developer role at Softwire requires employees to become familiar with a range of languages and technologies, so this is an important thing for us to look at. We are absolutely not testing the candidate on their knowledge of Ruby (or any other language) - we just want to see how they respond to a new problem in an unfamiliar environment.
I suspect that the 'poor code' comment above refers to one of our interview questions which involves giving the candidate some code with bugs in it and asking them to find and fix the bugs, and say how they would improve the code generally. This is the only question in which we provide a significant amount of code to the candidate, and the code is deliberately poor - otherwise there'd be nothing for the candidate to improve on. I'm guessing that this wasn't made clear in your interview, for which I must apologise.