I hire people who are recommended to me and I get contracted by people who recommended me. This has not changed since the first project I got (almost 30 years ago; I was recommended by my high school physics teacher). If that is not enough, then I am not very interested; it definitely tells more about me than some test. And the other way around; I have never had to fire an engineer that was recommended this way to me. They were always great to work with.
Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
81–90 of 120 posts
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#82I am happy for people who has energy, free time, and will to prove their abilities. I don't have the will, or energy for that. I have been working in the area like for the approx. last 2 decades. If anyone wants to validate if I can really code, can put 1 hour of their time and go over my github/gitlab profiles instead of asking 1 hour of my free time to redo what I was doing professionally. This will be counted agai…
Err.. but then how we can select fresh grads and early 20s against old dudes legally?...
Test their ability by assigning them some paid task for a week and look for results: if they return good results, hire them. If not, dump them, but it's a win-win for fresh grads and for companies.
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#83Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have over 100,000 LoC in the public domain, in over 30 repos (the ones I'm highlighting). I have architected, deployed and shepherded large-scale hybrid systems that are currently in use daily by thousands of people around the world. I have a decade of checkins and mineable Git data. I have solved every single problem that I've ever encountered; whether technical or human (I was a manager for a long time). I have c…
I'm hiring a lot at the moment, I have multiple interviews every day, we had 100s of candidates, but not a single one had more than a getting-started project on their GitHub profile. I'd take open source code any day over our coding exercise, but I cannot hire people without seeing some code first.
Yeah...but you see, I have committed a serious, unforgivable crime.
I've allowed myself to become old. I'm well past 40.
Most of the time, rejections come within a couple of hours of submission, so I know that a "robo-scrubber" detected eld, and bounced my résumé.
It's actually funny. I see a position advertised, where I am a 100% fit, I submit a CV, and get a bounce within an hour.
Then I see the position still being advertised weeks later.
I have considered adding the following line to the top of my LinkedIN profile:
"Let's just get this out of the way: I'm over 40. If that's a problem, then let's not waste each others' time."
I REALLY don't want to work anywhere that I'm not wanted. I have the rare privilege of being able to do more or less what I want. I love coding. I'm an outstanding manager, but I don't love it.
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I completely agree (and sympathize) with this frustration, there are two things I want to point out. 1. If you can do all these things, then it really won't take that long to freshen up your your white board skills so that you can solve a variety of algorithmic problems easily in code on a whiteboard. If you really want to work for at a FAANG-style place, then just divert your energy for a bit into practicing w…
1) Why would I bother spending time "freshening up" on HackerRank? I don't do DSA, so things like binary trees are a waste of time for me; but they are a favorite of schools. Every second I'm doing that is a second that I'm not devoting to the driver work I'm doing (ONVIF stuff). I have a VERY full dance card. Writing generic driver code for a sloppy spec like ONVIF is...challenging. I was interviewed a while back fo…
Look I'm not trying to be rude, an attitude like yours doesn't really fit into a startup.
They aren't looking for an absolute rockstar who believes their experience puts them in a level above all other engineers, or someone who believes they are too good to go through the process everyone else went through.
They want someone who won't spread toxicity through the small team, and your numerous accolades does nothing to convey that. However, the way you've conducted yourself so far speaks volumes.
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm hiring a lot at the moment, I have multiple interviews every day, we had 100s of candidates, but not a single one had more than a getting-started project on their GitHub profile. I'd take open source code any day over our coding exercise, but I cannot hire people without seeing some code first.
Yeah...but you see, I have committed a serious, unforgivable crime. I've allowed myself to become old. I'm well past 40. Most of the time, rejections come within a couple of hours of submission, so I know that a "robo-scrubber" detected eld, and bounced my résumé. It's actually funny. I see a position advertised, where I am a 100% fit, I submit a CV, and get a bounce within an hour. Then I see the position still bein…
I'm 41 and just hired a 50 year old devops guy, because he's good, a little nuts and fits our salary range. The problem with older developers for me is mostly the salary expectations. I'm looking for mid level or senior people, but for most developer positions a few years experience are enough – we're not doing rocket science and the extra experience only makes them more expensive, not more effective. This looks totally different for architect level positions where someone at 25 years just isn't credible enough.
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#87As a hiring manager I'm literally losing sleep over this problem.
I've been on both sides of this now and it's such a delicate balance.
As a developer, you want to be fairly evaluated to prove your worth.
As a hiring manager, you want to make sure you don't hire a dud (or worse, someone that will drag down the rest of your team).
I spend more than 1/2 of my day now trying to build out a team that I need to aggressively hire for. I've radically revamped our hiring questions to ensure they are:
* Based on real-world code. That means coding up components if you're a front end developer or API contracts if you're a back end developer.
* Includes a breadth of tasks. PR reviews, writing code, writing tests, and systems design are all a part of the assessment - not just algorithms tests.
* Has clear acceptance criteria. I want to remove as much bias and subjectivity from the assessment as possible. Every question we use has a Wiki page designed to formulate the question, the unit tests, and sample answers as well as grading criteria depending on the level we're hiring for. Expectations for Principal engineers are different than those for mid-level engineers.
It's not perfect. I'm not perfect. But I'm trying. SO hard. I hope that we're resolving this problem in the best way possible for both us as a company and you as the candidate.
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#88What 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'd point to the automated coding tests that involve zero talking and give the company a simple numerical score on which to assess the candidate and ask you what about those? I'd also point to the companies that put a candidate alone in a room with the test and wait for the candidate to finish, again dismissing the candidate if they don't produce an answer that matches.
Full disclosure; I screwed up one of those enormously several years ago when I just couldn't remember the C++ std function for turning a string into an int. Was it toString? tostring? stringify? No, that's crazy, none of the std has "ify" on the end. I must be thinking of some other framework I used once. What about intToString? No, that can't be it. itos? itoa? That's not standard. They've given me locked down web access to a C++ reference (and nothing else), I can just use that. WTF - this isn't cppreference.com. I suppose I could open up the header and ... oh, it includes a bunch more headers, and string of course is itself really basic_string so I'm going to be searching through a lot of template...
Suffice to say I was looking for to_string, and what I did was blow through too much of my time trying to remember this, and writing my own function to do it instead, which worked fine, but then I ran out of time and didn't finish all the tasks in the time permitted. For want of remembering to_string.
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#89My first interview was at a marketing company in Boulder, CO. They stuck me on one side of a long table with all the other developers in the other side. They proceeded to grill me on obscure gotchas and had me white board fucking solves for shit like palindromes. At one point one of the developers stood up and said “look, it’s so easy!” And proceeded to write out his obviously premeditated/optimized one liner on the…
Reading some comments here, and having recently gone through a number of interviews, I'm contemplating taking my own CS questions to which I know the answers to see how the interviewers solve problems, and what happens when they don't have the answers to a given problem.
I'm not sure how it would be received
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm hiring a lot at the moment, I have multiple interviews every day, we had 100s of candidates, but not a single one had more than a getting-started project on their GitHub profile. I'd take open source code any day over our coding exercise, but I cannot hire people without seeing some code first.
Do you offer any engineer as a pair for the testing? Or can you except personal project codebase offers instead of the automated tests? Also don't you have an onsite technical interview process that you use to assess the candidates abilities which invalidates any need for online coding tests? If you can't answer yes to these questions. Unfortunately you are part of the problem.
Those algorithm test platforms are completely useless. I stopped using them long ago. No engineer I hire has to sort shit or filter out duplicates. I assume they know the sort functions in the language. I ask engineers with a blank GitHub to implement a small demo project which shouldn't take longer than 2-3h to finish and they have 2 weeks time (or actually as long as they need) to deliver. It gives me a lot of insight, I can see how people structure their code and if the code looks sloppy etc. You don't get a normal day at work result if you put people under pressure with these pseudo-hacker platforms. Most of the candidates have a life and I don't expect them to spend their evenings on some platform to impress potential new employers.