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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?

#61
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.

I work in the US with engineers, techs, and business side people who obviously aren't programmers as well as software people. What I find is those people's culture is much less toxic than software[1].

However my experience with a couple of UK programmers was they were alright.

[1] Except for game developers and embedded.

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

#62

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.

I'm going to second that. I don't ever consider CTH, and there's a pretty strong body of programmers who feel the same way. There's too much risk in it.

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

#63

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 codi…

> 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 see comments similar to this one all the time. Are folks literally referring to the 'FizzBuzz' problem, or is that just an alias for a problem they subjectively find easy?

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

#64
In most software companies you are required, as part of your job, to communicate effectively with people who might not agree with you. That includes clients and co-workers. Including situations where things are heated and stressful. White board tests are great for finding out if you can stay level and communicate clearly in a stressful situation. Calling things stupid and slamming the door just shows you are not capable of doing a lot of real world software development jobs. Which involve a lot more than coding software.

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

#65
post #27

Unless I have copious free time (and I don't) then I'm not going to browse 130 Github repositories and wouldn't known from Adam if they are forks or not (unless they were all created close together). Thus I cannot trust the metrics from them either LinkedIn, blogs - not exactly reliable sources of information given they are what you are saying about yourself. We've had candidates list the number of Instagram likes th…

This is super interesting response.

Because today's research on code plagiarism is huge (this mean years spent in code re-engineering by really clever people), and I could argue you could use just one employee to develop a profile crawler and validation workflow, isn't so? I am saying you could automate the browsing and just discard Adam if he's below your threshold.

Thank you for your reply.

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

#66

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 codi…

The problem I see with FizzBuzz is if you knew the problem, it would be super easy to remember. Otherwise, with the time pressure, anyone could fail just as Federer could fail a simple shot. You need a whole game to prove he's Federer, you follow me?

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

#67
post #30

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…

IMHO I did enough coding, even wrote papers, just to find recruiters didn't eve bother to read the titles.

Your reply makes me thought about a community certification test, taxonomy or classification of company profiles. Which as far as I know it doesn't exists.

Wasn't the IQ tests somewhat discarded by Stephen Jay Gould work? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man

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

#68
post #30

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…

IMHO I did enough coding, even wrote papers, just to find recruiters didn't eve bother to read the titles. Your reply makes me thought about a community certification test, taxonomy or classification of company profiles. Which as far as I know it doesn't exists. Wasn't the IQ tests somewhat discarded by Stephen Jay Gould work? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man

Recruiters hardly ever seem to dig into things... But if you get far enough in the process, the people doing the interviews sometimes will dig a bit. Sometimes. Sometimes they print off your resume 10 minutes before, ask one or two things about it, and throw you a couple whiteboard problems to take up the rest of the time.

A college degree in CS or related used to be a kind of 'community certification test', but then interviewers started getting bad candidates even though they had BS or MS degrees, and when they started testing for ability to program a FizzBuzz, found that some MS students couldn't do it! So its value as a test has gone down significantly. This is why I like the idea of an IQ test better, because it can't be cheated and corrupted the same way.

Classification of company profiles is kind of what Glassdoor et al. purport to be, but sometimes I can get the feeling I won't fit in just from the company's website and how it represents itself (especially if they have a dev blog). e.g. One company had a picture of a scrum team doing pushups together at standup. I'm not opposed to exercise, or the idea of getting together with some coworkers to go work out at a gym, but I am opposed to such group dynamics and conformity pressures at work. If I worked on a team that already had the established culture of doing pushups during the daily standup, I would decline, and that probably indicates there would be other cultural problems down the line.

I'm not familiar with Gould's discussion of IQ but I generally don't trust Gould's work at all and don't bother reading it. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BahoNzY2pzSeM2Dtk/beware-of-... convinced me of that, what he did to evolutionary biology isn't really forgivable. From the first sentence of your wiki link I would worry he did the same to IQ research by representing everyone in the field as whatever he characterizes are "biological determinists". IQ is merely the best single predictor we have for a large variety of "success" metrics. Its validity predicting job performance, as one of those metrics, depends on the job and can range from 20% to 80% (i.e. knowing nothing about a person but their IQ, for some jobs, you can predict their performance bracket accurately say 75% of the time -- they will be better or worse than predicted the other 25%). I suspect software job performance would be towards the upper end of predictive power. Throwing a second data point of Conscientiousness in, your predictive accuracy rises even more, but Conscientiousness alone isn't as useful as IQ alone.

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