The HR hiring process here seems poorly thought out. I was asked to complete a test that included three parts: a set of Laravel questions, a series of middle school level word problems, and a LeetCode style coding challenge. Roughly half of the Laravel questions were relevant and practical. The rest focused on obscure function names rather than core concepts like facades, Eloquent, the service container, or dependency injection. Trivia like this is not a good measure of real Laravel skills. We use documentation for a reason. The word problem section is not difficult, but I fail to see the value. Be sure to bring a pencil and paper, there is no warning about the format, and once you start, you’re locked in with your camera on. The final part required writing a sorting algorithm from scratch without using PHP’s built in functions. Most senior level engineers have not hand coded a sorting algorithm since college. Really bizarre way to assess senior talent when you provide them an exercise that a college student would probably score higher in. If the goal is to hire strong engineers, consider a real technical conversation where you go over core Laravel features. Then if necessary follow up with a relevant take home task to show their skills. This test doesn’t reflect real world development skills and was a complete a waste of time.