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Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

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Re: Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

#61

Post by jordanpg »

pizzaman09 wrote: post #11
jordanpg wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, but what is the alternative from the standpoint of the interviewer? These types of challenges are simple to state, self-contained, easy to timebox. For the interviewer for a say intermediate-level enterprise software backend position who needs to quickly sift through 50 applicants, what is the better option by way of code challenges?

Credentialing. Seriously. Have a Bar Association for developers. When anyone can do a few weeks of Googling and claim to be a software developer, you're going to get mostly crap candidates. Offload that process to a formal body, like lawyers, doctors, and engineers do. You can hire unlicensed developers, but you do so at your own risk. Then once you're talking to someone licensed in an interview, you can focus on jus…

There is powerful opposition in our line of work to this type of thing, particularly the standardized tests. I don't fully understand it because I think that certification exams, etc. have clear, if limited value.

I think it stems from an intrinsic starting point among many developers that programming is a true meritocracy and that all hiring questions can be settled with a judicious study of what the person is truly capable of (eg. the fabled personal github account filled with side projects). And that anything other than "hacking on the code" is a waste of time.

Of course this isn't how the real world works. In fact almost no one has the time, energy, or inclination to do impressive side projects. Gauging skills on the basis on resumes and very short interviews is quite hard and time-consuming. Hiring decisions are made on the basis of essentially social interactions and personal references.

I do think there is room for an informal credentialing process in principle, but there are longstanding mental blocks that will need to be skirted. There will need to be leadership from the top to make this happen, ie. the best, most-respected programmers will need to take it seriously first.

Re: Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

#62

Post by mindcrime »

davb wrote: post #55
wolfgke wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are so many programming languages, frameworks out there that are constantly evolving and companies have different demands. An idea that I have thought of is to standardize on some programming language/frameworks/demands that are known to be supported for a very long time (15 years?). If you need something from this buffet, you are fine and have the advantages that this provides. If you have special demands, y…

I would love to see some sort of standardisation and rationalisation within software engineering. It's so fragmented and ego driven. Every framework is better than the last, my programming language is better than yours. Thought is rarely given to longevity. I'd much rather work with a more dated ecosystem that I know will be around of true next 20 years than the continual paradigm shifts we endure just now. I'm exhau…

Fair point, but consider that software engineering is a MUCH younger profession than, say, accounting. Consider that "double entry book-keeping" dates back to around 1340, and accounting in general is even older than that.

We've had about 60 years to figure this stuff out, and arguably the ground is always moving beneath our feat as the nature and scope of the systems we build keeps changing.

I'm exhausted and frustrated with the field as it exists just now.

Likewise, but I'm not sure what choice we have, except to hope Ray Kurzweil is right about some of this life extension ideas. If we can survive another 300-400 years, maybe things will be better.

Re: Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

#63

Post by icebraining »

pizzaman09 wrote: post #11
jordanpg wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, but what is the alternative from the standpoint of the interviewer? These types of challenges are simple to state, self-contained, easy to timebox. For the interviewer for a say intermediate-level enterprise software backend position who needs to quickly sift through 50 applicants, what is the better option by way of code challenges?

Credentialing. Seriously. Have a Bar Association for developers. When anyone can do a few weeks of Googling and claim to be a software developer, you're going to get mostly crap candidates. Offload that process to a formal body, like lawyers, doctors, and engineers do. You can hire unlicensed developers, but you do so at your own risk. Then once you're talking to someone licensed in an interview, you can focus on jus…

doctors

Because the healthcare job market is such a success! Remember those accusations against tech companies for colluding to depress wages? Now imagine the same, but with State immunity!

The anti-trust class-action lawsuit Jung v. AAMC alleged collusion to prevent American trainee doctors from negotiating for better working conditions. The working conditions of medical residents often involved 80- to 100-hour workweeks. The suit had some early success, but failed when the U.S. Congress enacted a statute exempting matching programs from federal anti-trust laws.

Re: Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

#64

Post by pizzaman09 »

icebraining wrote: post #63
pizzaman09 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credentialing. Seriously. Have a Bar Association for developers. When anyone can do a few weeks of Googling and claim to be a software developer, you're going to get mostly crap candidates. Offload that process to a formal body, like lawyers, doctors, and engineers do. You can hire unlicensed developers, but you do so at your own risk. Then once you're talking to someone licensed in an interview, you can focus on jus…

doctors Because the healthcare job market is such a success! Remember those accusations against tech companies for colluding to depress wages? Now imagine the same, but with State immunity! The anti-trust class-action lawsuit Jung v. AAMC alleged collusion to prevent American trainee doctors from negotiating for better working conditions. The working conditions of medical residents often involved 80- to 100-hour work…

I never said "let's make software licensure exactly like healthcare licensure". There are parts of healthcare licensure we could also criticize, but that's not my point. If you'd like to discuss specific parts of softwares licensure, I'm more than willing, but don't engage in faulty reasoning.

Re: Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

#65

Post by pizzaman09 »

jordanpg wrote: post #61
pizzaman09 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credentialing. Seriously. Have a Bar Association for developers. When anyone can do a few weeks of Googling and claim to be a software developer, you're going to get mostly crap candidates. Offload that process to a formal body, like lawyers, doctors, and engineers do. You can hire unlicensed developers, but you do so at your own risk. Then once you're talking to someone licensed in an interview, you can focus on jus…

There is powerful opposition in our line of work to this type of thing, particularly the standardized tests. I don't fully understand it because I think that certification exams, etc. have clear, if limited value. I think it stems from an intrinsic starting point among many developers that programming is a true meritocracy and that all hiring questions can be settled with a judicious study of what the person is truly…

Another solution is law. Establish a formal licensure body and then slowly make it necessary for things like government contracts, or even private contracts.

Re: Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

#66

Post by pizzaman09 »

Joboman555 wrote: post #27
pizzaman09 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credentialing. Seriously. Have a Bar Association for developers. When anyone can do a few weeks of Googling and claim to be a software developer, you're going to get mostly crap candidates. Offload that process to a formal body, like lawyers, doctors, and engineers do. You can hire unlicensed developers, but you do so at your own risk. Then once you're talking to someone licensed in an interview, you can focus on jus…

This is maligned and dangerous. It has been shown that credentialing hurts the marketplace and consumers. Having a credential authority would not cause there to be a skill bar, it would just require all of us to pay money to a worthless authority.

It has been shown where? Please don't forget that inexperienced practitioners also hurt the marketplace and customers. Every data breach because someone kept a plaintext password field in MySQL hurts the customers. Every lost hour of productivity because of shoddy code hurts customers.

Re: Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

#67

Post by pizzaman09 »

klodolph wrote: post #34
pizzaman09 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credentialing. Seriously. Have a Bar Association for developers. When anyone can do a few weeks of Googling and claim to be a software developer, you're going to get mostly crap candidates. Offload that process to a formal body, like lawyers, doctors, and engineers do. You can hire unlicensed developers, but you do so at your own risk. Then once you're talking to someone licensed in an interview, you can focus on jus…

Big companies already spend a lot of time and money interviewing candidates to figure out if they should be hired. Credentialing will turn that into either a standardized test (which is known to be inferior) or simply require a degree (which will exclude too many good candidates).

Under a hypothetical licensure system, companies would be more than welcome to hide rockstar Chad from the local CS department. They would just, for example, be more liable for damages or something. We can think of all types of licensure schemes, with all types of consequences. What makes you think software engineer credentialing will automatically work out poorly? Moreover, have you also considered its benefits? Oftentimes the world exists in shades of grey, where a system has good parts as well as bad parts. Lawyer credentialing, for example, isn't perfect, but it's better than nothing at all.

Re: Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

#68

Post by pizzamannine »

trentmb wrote: post #28
pizzaman09 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credentialing. Seriously. Have a Bar Association for developers. When anyone can do a few weeks of Googling and claim to be a software developer, you're going to get mostly crap candidates. Offload that process to a formal body, like lawyers, doctors, and engineers do. You can hire unlicensed developers, but you do so at your own risk. Then once you're talking to someone licensed in an interview, you can focus on jus…

It exists: https://ncees.org/engineering/pe/software/ No one cares though.

Hence our dilemma.

Re: Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

#69

Post by jarsin »

shados wrote: post #43
carlmr wrote: post #4

> Exactly on point. Also one gripe I have with hackerrank (I did some of the challenges to brush up on some language knowledge), is that a lot of the questions are poorly designed and from obvious amateurs. I still think that neither whiteboarding nor hackerrank selects for good developers. In the end you get people that studied hard to solve a certain class of problem that you'll never need in the real world. It's w…

> similar tests aren’t necessarily relevant to the work actually done in finance technology roles IMO, what's relevant for a role is the skill set most people currently doing that role have and that's not always a good thing. I've been the first shouting on top of a roof that we shouldn't ask people to know stupid little algorithm trivias to get a job. But the narative for that quickly devolved to "data structures an…

Testing foundation is great but that is not at all what the current interviewing system does. It hides foundation in trick questions that require you to have a moment of insight that fires off a light bulb that you can then use your foundation to solve.

For example why cant they just ask. Ok givin an array find all the pairs of the array. Great now whats the big O of that. Great...

Instead they ask some trick question that disguises the fact that you should solve this problem by finding all pairs etc.

Re: Why HackerRank and other coding tests are ageist

#70

Post by pizzamannine »

dagenleg wrote: post #21
pizzaman09 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credentialing. Seriously. Have a Bar Association for developers. When anyone can do a few weeks of Googling and claim to be a software developer, you're going to get mostly crap candidates. Offload that process to a formal body, like lawyers, doctors, and engineers do. You can hire unlicensed developers, but you do so at your own risk. Then once you're talking to someone licensed in an interview, you can focus on jus…

You are just adding a lot of useless bureaucratic overhead. Are you sure that the problem you are trying to solve will not just be replaced with an even worse one?

No, I'm not, but that's, to be rather frank, a stupid fucking reason not to try. :)
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