Ask HN: Can you actually get a dev job without doing a stupid quiz?

> referrals, it cuts all the bullshit

Referrals get one out of the internet-resume-void, but you still go through the standard interview process, right? I've always seen referrals as a "guaranteed shot at the interviews coding games". Am I doing it wrong?

As someone who has spent a lot of time implementing & arguing for work sample based hiring, the hardest part is getting places to remove the useless interviews from their filter process.

Very few devs given the choice between 8 hours of interviews & 7 hours of work sample/1 hour of interview will choose the former. But companies just add the work sample & leave the interviews defeating the point.

Between having to endure a "stupid test" and have to shelve a wad of cash just to get a very expensive piece of paper, give me the stupid test every single time.

At least the people doing the stupid tests are checking for stuff that is relevant to them instead of wasting time with pedantic aspects of a programming language or tech stack.

Tests like these are a relatively effective way of weeding out people who simply aren't up to the job. You can say anything you like about yourself, and you can curate your online presence to make yourself look like an experienced, competent developer, but your code doesn't lie.

I agree that tests can be bad, frustrating, badly designed or just plain incompetent - but ultimately I'd rather hire someone who knows what they don't know than someone who thinks they can wing it. When I've been tested like this in the past, I just explain which questions I can't answer and why. If they want to talk it through, then great. If not, then do I want to work for them anyway if the attitude seems negative?

The real issue you need to overcome is fear of failure. Aside from some specific cases, nobody in the hiring process really cares whether or not you 'pass' the test - it is (or should be) more important to assess how you approach the problem and whether you are capable of acknowledging what you don't know and talking through your thinking.

I'm a bit confused by your reference to HackerRank -- is not "extract max value without a binary search tree" a kind of problem that might show up there? Is it that type of problem you're complaining about, or the fact that you've already done enough in public that you shouldn't have to be subjected to it again time after time?

If it's the latter, a counterpoint is that doing these sorts of tests (usually not strict pass/fail ones but ones with levels of progression or orthogonal points of detail like "handles the divide-by-zero case without it being pointed out") lets me rank candidate A and B in a consistent and arguably more fair way. Sometimes A will have lots of impressive github contributions, while B will have nothing but schoolwork to discuss. Personally I'm unwilling to automatically grant the job to A on such a basis as publicly available work artifacts, or indeed anything on their resume (such info probably made it easier to get to the interview stage, of course) so I test A and B the same way. I might expect A to do better, but I give B the chance anyway, and B sometimes does way better. If A's past work/volunteer experience isn't directly related to the jobs which they'll be asked to do, how valuable is it? I think minimal. (It may become more valuable in the future, but such hidden future utility applies just the same to B, just in likely less obvious places such as the ability to read a crypto paper and pump out exploit code in a couple days rather than a month or two.[1])

All that said, I'd love it if I could just give (and as a candidate, receive) a certified IQ test (or perhaps the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderlic_test) and OCEAN personality test once every n years that can be reused. A lot of jobs don't require anything else but "smart and gets things done" (i.e. high enough IQ and trait conscientiousness). Maybe something fizzbuzzy in addition in order to lower job onboarding costs, though you'll find anecdotes of companies hiring smart people who couldn't program and successfully training them / otherwise supporting their education to become good programmers.

My advice for finding a less-BS job besides the already-linked no-whiteboards repo (which is a bit suspect since I know at least one company on the list shouldn't be in general) is to find one that isn't in high competition from candidates (they're more likely to shorten the process to find someone good enough, i.e. "smart and gets things done") or one with a very defined job role (in which case they'll test you on that knowledge specifically if your public contributions don't make its presence evident rather than give the usual generic quizzes that sort of act as proxies of IQ or ability to do real non-quiz work).

[1] https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/