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

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

#41

Post by alchemism »

thepp1983 wrote: post #21
Gibbon1 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first boss used to do a short quiz just to weed out anyone that was wasting his time and that was that. But of course programming culture is hypertoxic so that's been turned into the roommate interview scene in Shallow Grave.

Programming culture is not hypertoxic. Maybe it is in the United States in the UK pretty much everyone just sits down and gets on with it.

Speaking personally, I was a bit surprised at the culture I experienced the first time I worked alongside younger American programmers, as opposed to my prior experiences with remote offshore teammembers, onshore H1B programmers, and the American greybeards from the earlier IT era.

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

#42

Post by lucozade »

What you're effectively saying is that, if the recruiter puts enough effort in, they can find out how good you really are.

This is, of course, true. The problem is that that's not the problem they're trying to solve. What the recruiter is doing is finding people that have a high chance of meeting their criteria in a reasonably scalable way. Or facetiously, you may think it's about you but it's not.

Now, most of the ways they go about this aren't actually that great. But having the recruiters running around after you will definitely be worse.

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

#43

Post by Jach »

ivanstegic wrote: post #34
sawmurai wrote: post #23

I think the only interviewing process that really works is to invite the candidate to work for one day, side by side with their future team. This also gives the candidate a glimpse into the culture behind the HR marketing bs.

Agree. We just recently went through a failed employee hire (even though we had a mini project for the candidate) and in the retrospective we came to the conclusion that our whole team was first hired as a contractor and then later converted to an employee. So we’re going to just keep doing that from now on.

How do you decide whom to hire for the contract role though? ;) A bad hire should indicate that your mini project missed testing something important for your team. In my own experience with an intern who didn't live up to my hopes, I realized I wasn't testing for the ability to read code not written by them, whose whole they cannot hold all in their heads (only a contextual part at a time), and make some changes to it. I do that now.

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

#44

Post by CyanLite4 »

For every developer that complains about a coding “quiz”, there are a dozen more candidates that have been weeded out by them.

You’d be surprised by the number of candidates who say they are “senior software engineer” or “10 years experience as a lead developer” who still can’t do FizzBuzz. Or the ones who can do it but takes them 100 lines of code.

I’ve also turned away candidates who didn’t want to do a simple coding test, but still wanted to work with us. Entitled people are just as damaging to a company as incompetent ones.

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

#45

Post by thepp1983 »

dasmoth wrote: post #36
thepp1983 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I can't stand these tests either. I normally complete them fine. However I've been to job interviews where they force me to code live in front of several people and I couldn't get half a line of code out before one of them will chip in with a "suggestion" breaking my train of thought. The code they want me to write is some algorithm that they have expected you to memorise. I normally leave the interview fr…

However I've been to job interviews where they force me to code live in front of several people and I couldn't get half a line of code out before one of them will chip in with a "suggestion" breaking my train of thought. The code they want me to write is some algorithm that they have expected you to memorise. This could actually be the test in itself. There seems to be a substantial contigent who believe that this is…

If the test is like that I have zero interest in working there.

This is for two reasons

1. I don't like silly games in interviews. You aren't respecting me or my time before I am working for you, you aren't likely to while I am working for you.

2. I personally like to be left alone while working on something. Then again I find scrum calls etc a total waste of time.

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

#46

Post by thepp1983 »

Jach wrote: post #38
thepp1983 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I can't stand these tests either. I normally complete them fine. However I've been to job interviews where they force me to code live in front of several people and I couldn't get half a line of code out before one of them will chip in with a "suggestion" breaking my train of thought. The code they want me to write is some algorithm that they have expected you to memorise. I normally leave the interview fr…

Lack of controlling for anxiety is probably the biggest contributor to false negatives... At least you got the offer though. On the interviewer side of the table, I had a candidate and there was a stretch of silence after they confirmed they understood the problem which I interrupted with "Is there anything I can help clarify?" (I can't observe internal state!) They asked me if I could be quiet for 5 minutes while th…

I normally just wanna hack out a problem first, work out for myself what the short comings is with my first approach and then make all the relative changes.

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

#47

Post by geezerjay »

wolfgke wrote: post #32
geezerjay wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. Why not go fot the idea that one pays the cost in advance, but as soon as you get hired, the future employer will repay the costs to you?

Because paying is the problem, and expecting that prospective employers would pay for your expenses for a test that is used to infer basic competences is at best wishful thinking.

We only need to look at the current state of qualification mills/moocs to get a good idea how job seekers would be fleeced by these so called certification systems.

It's far better to get in front of a prospective employer and solve whiteboard problems than just be a number in a clueless HR drone's database.

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

#48

Post by pesheh »

I'm honestly surprised by the amount of people complaining about the interviewing process. First of all, have in mind that the interviewer should have some kind of an objective measure, you need to judge all candidates the same way. There are many great developers who don't work outside of their job, so GitHub is out of the question. LinkedIn is self kept and doesn't really show your skills, just your CV. Reaching high levels in HackerRank takes a lot more time than the interviews probably, and you still have no objective way to judge candidates.

And this is where interviews or coding problems come. They allow the interviewer to judge your ability to code and compare it to other candidates. And, probably even more importantly, your social skills, which in a team or in a relatively small company are essential.

But... Why go through all this? Other professions don't do it, right! Well, at least in Europe, most other professions aren't even nearly as well paid as even a junior dev.

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

#49

Post by Jach »

dasmoth wrote: post #36
thepp1983 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I can't stand these tests either. I normally complete them fine. However I've been to job interviews where they force me to code live in front of several people and I couldn't get half a line of code out before one of them will chip in with a "suggestion" breaking my train of thought. The code they want me to write is some algorithm that they have expected you to memorise. I normally leave the interview fr…

However I've been to job interviews where they force me to code live in front of several people and I couldn't get half a line of code out before one of them will chip in with a "suggestion" breaking my train of thought. The code they want me to write is some algorithm that they have expected you to memorise. This could actually be the test in itself. There seems to be a substantial contigent who believe that this is…

Great point on this possibility... A big source of brokenness with tech interviews is that so many interviewers want to setup an interview (often adversarial, where the interviewer holds more cards) where candidates get ranked primarily on subjective hidden variables. If the real test isn't the given test, the interviewer sucks. Measure as directly as you can what you care about, whether it's technical criteria or softer criteria, and if the answer is on one candidate's resume but not another's, ask about it rather than assume the other doesn't have it. Want to know how the candidate collaborates? Prime them with that expectation, that the problem solving is a joint effort. Want to know how someone functions in the face of conflict? Ask about their experience with conflict and resolving it, rather than try to setup some conflict and seeing how they respond (or don't). Want to see if they can write a good unit test? Ask them to write some tests rather than saying something vague like "develop as you normally would". Whatever it is, the important part is making clear to the candidate as much as possible what is the hidden state in your head that you're using to evaluate them.

My own dream as candidate/interviewer is to spend some hours trying to solve an interesting problem together that neither of us has solved before. Unfortunately it's not repeatable for the interviewer (at least once it gets solved, until then there might be a way with a big problem to bootstrap a candidate to build on past candidate+interviewer's efforts), and even then its main use is judging "works with the interviewer well" when there are probably better things you should be measuring in most cases.

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

#50

Post by wolfgke »

geezerjay wrote: post #47
wolfgke wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Why not go fot the idea that one pays the cost in advance, but as soon as you get hired, the future employer will repay the costs to you?

Because paying is the problem, and expecting that prospective employers would pay for your expenses for a test that is used to infer basic competences is at best wishful thinking. We only need to look at the current state of qualification mills/moocs to get a good idea how job seekers would be fleeced by these so called certification systems. It's far better to get in front of a prospective employer and solve whitebo…

> Because paying is the problem, and expecting that prospective employers would pay for your expenses for a test that is used to infer basic competences is at best wishful thinking.

I am cautious with this kind of statement, since this saves the respective company time to check these competencies by itself, which is a pecuniary advantage for the company (since it can obiously use this time to earn money).

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