I like coding tests. They give me an opportunity to differentiate myself.
Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
11–20 of 120 posts
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#12What if I told you coding tests were to get the developer to talk through a problem and see how they go about it, rather than actually see them finish it?
I would tell you all the tough to get into companies only hire candidates that answer correctly.
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#13I work mainly with Swift nowadays and some stuff like String handling is way more complex than in other languages like C#. Since I'm not doing a lot of series-of-characters manipulations in my daily work I need to rely on Google and a friendly IDE that highlights errors and warnings and provides autocompletion through get through tests like simple anagrams. Codility and co have neither.
Nothing worse than unsuccessfully sweating through an exercise for 20 minutes on something super simple, only to fix it within a Playground in a minute just because you get errors, warnings and autocomplete.
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#14Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#15Developers hate them because coding tests have devolved into multi-hour, unpaid assignments from which no feedback is given. It's especially bad if they are unwilling (as some seem to be) to have a short phone conversation prior to the coding test to tell you about the project.
I don't know about the US but here in the UK paying someone for a coding test is actually not as simple as it sounds. If you employ someone, even just for a half day test, you have to do a "Right to work" assessment (https://www.gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work) which can take up a lot of time. It's a pain in the *&^%.
At my company we give candidates something to cover any expenses they've had to pay to attend an interview and take them out to lunch somewhere nice afterwards. It'd be nice to do more, but companies can't because the government has decided stopping employing immigrants is more important than doing what's right for candidates.
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#16There are two kinds of programming work.
First kind is that of translating application logic into code using the pre-established frameworks and patterns. This involves application domain understanding and modeling of domain into system concepts exposed by the application platform's underlying frameworks and components.
Second kind is building these frameworks and components and assembling them into productive platforms with right system concepts that nicely solves for the application domain.
Why these two kinds? Because the nature (volume, churn, complexity axis) of the work differs significantly across this cut so much that the background experience and skills needed by the programmer for these two are very different.
In an interview, you cannot really verify the direct skills needed for either of these two types of jobs directly. Instead you can look for proxies. What are those:
1. Programming proficiency in a programming language of candidate's choice – you can verify this with an in-person 2-hour coding round within the interview loop. Goal of this round is to ask the candidate to demonstrate his mastery over the programming language of his choice by converting a given application logic into functioning programming. You can do this by giving a programming environment (developer laptop with Internet connection) with a written down problem statement with application logic and test input/output samples. After the candidate has spent 60-90 minutes on arriving at a working solution on their own, spend another 30 minutes doing a live code review and then asking the candidate to make one or two modifications (enhancements) which they can take another hour to complete. Clearly state the evaluation criteria – completeness of functionality, test cases, readability of code (passing a basic code review) etc. For candidate it is 2.5 hours, for interviewer it is 1-hour.
2. Expertise in relevant area – if the candidate has previously worked on either the same/similar application domain or built platforms for same/similar problem space, then that can be explored through multiple whiteboard discussions focusing on specific aspects of this supposed expertise.
3. Learnability and Problem-solving – most important skill in software industry is ability to figure things out from vague undefined scenarios and learn new things needed for doing so. Problem solving is being able to reason through a set of stated and unstated conditions/constraints to arrive at an acceptable way forward in any situation. These can be assessed through interview conversations as well as reference checks, and inferred from their work experience and accomplishments.
The above skills list is in increasing order of priority and their relative importance ratio increases for more senior developers.
The problem with automated coding tests is they only test for the basic programming skill and the evaluation criteria is not nuanced and the decision is usually harsh/hard/final. This is a waste of everyone time, but it definitely far worse for the candidate. Hence any smart and reasonably senior candidate would refuse to participate in interview loops that have these automated tests.
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#17As usual the managers and marketeers forget the obvious point.
You are asking a professional developer to write code for you. But apparently you expect them to do that for free.
In a supply constrained market, that's not how it works. If you want to do code assessments with professional developers, and therefore you don't want to do the leg work looking at and assessing their Github contributions, then you have to expect to pay them for their time.
Otherwise why should anybody who has fifteen options on their table waste their free time on you?
There was a time during the full employment era that people were paid expenses to attend interviews. It was considered good manners to respect people's time. That common courtesy seems to have gone by the wayside during the shortage of jobs era. Now the tables have turned again.
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#18Developers hate them because coding tests have devolved into multi-hour, unpaid assignments from which no feedback is given. It's especially bad if they are unwilling (as some seem to be) to have a short phone conversation prior to the coding test to tell you about the project.
> It's especially bad if they are unwilling (as some seem to be) to have a short phone conversation prior to the coding test to tell you about the project.
I'm sympathetic. But the last time I put out a job ad I got over 100 applications for a single opening. How should companies try to narrow that to a manageable number?
Just look at the CV and throw it out based on that? What do you look for on the CV that cuts out 80%+ on candidates to get the number down to an amount that I could have a short phone conversation with?
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#19[deleted]
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#20Our coding test actually revolves around things you would actually do as a coder — we give you a simple python script and ask you to identify a couple of problems with it, then read a PR that attempts to fix one of them and leave comments on it, then add a simple new feature, write a test and documentation for it and submit a PR. The actual coding part is fairly trivial and related to the work we do (interacting with the aws api)
We have a bunch of notes for the interviewer with common questions the applicants ask.
The whole thing takes like an hour, and it’s not a gotcha or brain teaser. It’s more about whether you understand requirements and can work with other people.