I was contacted by a recruiter. During a follow-up phone conversation, they asked me some questions about my experience and which mobile development platform I was strongest at developing for. I said iOS, and she sent over a technical challenge that consisted of three development questions and required 30 minutes to complete.

I received the questions and decided I would work on them, as I have considerable experience with iOS (by then, six years).

The questions were incredibly difficult. They weren't about the platform itself but were obscure software development questions that just happened to be in Objective-C. I did the best I could and thought I would receive partial credit for at least showing my work. It's clear that only geniuses, people who wrote the questions themselves, or developers who cheat by getting their friends to help them would pass this assessment. If someone is a genius, why would they want to work at CapitalOne when they could work at Google or Facebook?

After completing the assessment, I did not hear back from the recruiter. I was interviewing at another, more reputable organization and received an offer from them. I emailed the recruiter, stating that I was not sure where they were in the process but had accepted another position.

I then received an email back from the recruiter saying, "I had sent you an email earlier to let you know that unfortunately, based on your technical assessment, we will not be moving forward."

I understand I did not do well on the assessment, but why would I follow up if I had already received an email from her? She is either calling me a liar or a loser. I was trying to be professional with an organization that clearly lacked professionalism. It does not help that I have since been recruited by CapitalOne two more times since this debacle of a recruiting experience.

There is an "auto-marker" style with generic software development questions.

These are questions that you as a professional developer will not see on a regular basis. However, if you are fresh out of school or you like to challenge yourself with obscure software development questions, you will be able to get some of the answers.

I have 10 years of software development experience (5 as a senior developer) and I was unable to answer them correctly. I arrived at partial solutions, but they were not satisfactory to the auto-marker.

This style of technical assessment of candidates will truly reject good candidates just because they don't go out of their way to practice obscure development problems on a regular basis.