Applied on Synopsys web site and was contacted around two weeks later by the hiring manager for a quick phone call. Talked to the hiring manager for about an hour. He was very nice and we had a great call. It was all very positive, and I even received a email from the hiring manager thanking me for my time and looking forward to our next meeting to discuss the position. Always great when things get off to a good start.
The next step was to meet in person at a coffee shop the following week and in the meantime I was to complete Coverity's 11 question coding quiz. This quiz involves 11 code snippets where you must find the coding bug in each one. Some of the code bugs are obvious and some are very subtle. Most of the code snippets are C and C++, but a couple are Java. I am EE by degree and not a Computer Science major, and my C skills are decent (could be great if I concentrated on this every day), but I found a way to exercise all the test code with main driver programs and determine what I thought the bugs in the code were. I then wrote up a complete listing of all the driver code I used to exercise the snippets, as well as a description of what the code was doing and the issues. It was about 11 word document pages in all. I put quite a bit of effort into this to say the least.
Finished the coding quiz up and sent to the hiring manager over the weekend. Personal matters (understandably) on his end prevented us from meeting up at the coffee shop the following week, but he said he would call when he was back at work and settled. A few days passed with no call, and then I get email from him saying that I did not answer enough of the questions correctly on the quiz and that they were passing. He did send me the answers to the quiz, so at least I could compare my work.
The point is that I understand the need to screen people based on aptitude for the required skill sets. That is the way it is in a lot of places. However, the downside I see at Coverity is that this ALL they care about. You could be the best person in the world personally and have a lot of great experience that backs you up for the position, but if don't do well enough on their quiz, then forget it. I guess if you have a really crappy personality for a customer facing position such as the one I applied for, but do really well on their test, and you would still would be in their good graces. Seems to be a bit short sighted to me, but such is their process.
Bottom Line:
If you do interview at Coverity for any software related support position, get ready for this quiz. It will make or break you getting any further with them! They don't seem to care about anything else but this test.
