How we believe skills assessment should be done today
| Lesezeit:
When we founded our company back in 2012, we did it because we believed the market was handling skills assessment the wrong way. At that time, the IT industry was obsessed with algorithmic testing, verifying how well developers could solve abstract coding puzzles.
But we knew this approach didn’t reflect reality. Most professional developers don’t implement sorting algorithms or design data structures from scratch every day. These skills might impress in theory, but they say little about how someone performs in a real project environment.
Before founding DevSkiller, I had already been recruiting developers for years, and I kept seeing the same frustrating pattern. People who were excellent at algorithmic challenges, who could implement a perfect Fibonacci sequence or reverse a binary tree, often struggled with real-world engineering problems. They had no idea how transaction isolation worked or how to design systems that handle resilience and scale.
On the other hand, the best engineers I knew, the ones who truly delivered results in production, didn’t care about writing a quicksort from scratch. They would just say, “There’s a library for that, why would I waste time reimplementing it?” And they were absolutely right.
There was even a joke circulating among developers back then:
“This problem has zero practical relevance; it would make a perfect recruitment question.”
We couldn’t agree more, and that’s why we said no.
At DevSkiller, we built our entire platform around a simple belief: Only practical, real-world testing matters.We were very vocal about it, and over time, the market followed. One by one, our competitors shifted from algorithmic testing to real skills verification, validating candidates based on what they can actually do, not just what they can memorize.
SkillPanel: A new era in AI software development
Now, we are witnessing another major transformation.
AI tools have become a natural, indispensable part of software development. This new reality is what inspired our evolution into SkillPanel, a brand that reflects the next era of skills assessment.
To us, this makes no sense. Developers should be tested in the same environment they actually work in. Today, that environment includes AI. Pretending otherwise is as unrealistic as asking a developer to code without an IDE.
And let’s be honest, it’s simply impossible to prevent candidates from using AI.
AI is everywhere: you can access it through your IDE, browser, smartwatch, or even by dictating a prompt to your phone. Anyone claiming that their platform can truly stop people from using AI is lying, and that lie is aimed at people without sufficient technical knowledge who might actually believe it.
At SkillPanel , we believe AI is not a threat; it’s a skill. We design our tasks so they can’t be solved just by asking an AI to “do it for you.” Instead, candidates must demonstrate prompting fluency, understanding of agents and sub-agents, and awareness of best practices for leveraging AI effectively.
That’s why the insights you get from SkillPanel reflect how a person will actually perform in your project, using your technologies, frameworks, and tools, in a modern development environment where AI is a natural partner, not a forbidden trick.
We’ve always believed that skills assessment should evolve alongside the industry, and we’ll continue leading that change.
