A hiring test I'd like to run

There is three types of developers in this scenario. Those who "do it right from the start", they are slow. Those that do the quick and dirty, and create an issue in the issue tracker about what to change and why. Then there is those that do the quick and dirty with mental note about what to change, and never return to it.

I do not want the latter.

Very true. I suppose I worded my earlier comment poorly. You can generally infer age and gender from one's name and education dates (of course, not always). But the point I was trying to make it that this would not be explicitly on there, particularly marital status. But looks like even there I'm wrong.

Pictures on resumes? That's a new one for me.

We use a third party for the initial code screen because we feel like it’s more useful and more respectful to the candidates. We worked with them to pick questions that were representative of the type of “real” coding someone might do at our company, i.e. not algorithms or brain teasers. The company also includes a section assessing how the candidate communicates about bugs they’ve investigated. The screen allows 75 minutes and can be done any time the candidate wants, without someone sitting over their shoulder. When it’s done, the candidate gets the same feedback that we do about their performance. The feedback we get includes the candidate’s solution, a general “score,” and a series of bullets of things the candidate did and did not do well.

Compare this to what we did previously, which was to get one of our engineers on the phone and on a pair coding website to ask brain teasers. The candidate got no followup feedback if they didn’t do well. On top of that, because the people doing the interviews knew that if they said “no hire” it would stop the process in its tracks and the person would never get an on-site, we had something like a 95% pass rate. We evaluated several third parties for this, and felt the one we chose was the most useful and the most respectful of candidates’ time.

I understand that the process isn’t for everyone (no process is), but we’ve gotten generally good feedback from applicants so far about the company we chose (Woven, for the record).

Edit: also just noting that we don’t do any sort of hard cutoff for the scores they send us. We try to evaluate each candidate’s performance in light of their experience, looking at what they were and weren’t able to get done, etc. We had someone recently do amazingly on the first half but not even finish the second: presumably they ran out of time, but we brought them on anyway because we felt like their performance on the first half deserved earned them some further consideration, even though their overall score was quite low.

I figure if my initial contact & a work history that fits very closely with what the posting company's asking for (as it usually does when I personally apply somewhere, rather than letting recruiters bring me stuff) wasn't interesting enough to get someone on the phone and instead gets me directed to a screener robot, they're just Not That Into Me. If/when (next downturn, probably, when the number of applicants vastly outstrips the available jobs) everyone's doing it I'll just have to live with it, but for now, not worth an hour plus for a lottery ticket to maybe talk to someone. Others are excited to talk to me on seeing what I've done and what I might do for them. No need to buy lottery tickets with hours of my time.

Plus, I mean, I'm not as good at coding challenges as I am at actual development work (which is a lot of stuff, some of which is tappy-tappying code into an editor) so if that's the first gate I have to pass before anything else, that lottery ticket I'm buying with my hour typing at a robot ain't likely to pay out anyway, even if I'm actually the best candidate for the job itself, which isn't guaranteed. Luckily there are so many fish in the sea (job offers paying roughly the same) that it's not an issue for now. Hopefully I've fully "leveled up" into titles for which coding challenges aren't the norm in hiring before the next downturn, otherwise I guess I'll be spending some time drilling to preen those peacock feathers, which is what I'd have had to do this time if it weren't such a seller's market for devs.

Yeah, my curse and blessing is that I'm (apparently—I'm just going off feedback and where I've observed myself contributing strongly to projects) really good at parts of software development that don't really come through in coding challenges, even most of the ones that try to be like "real work", and that are also kinda hard to talk about directly without seeming like a bit of a prick. Good taste, good intuition, broad knowledge, a tendency to think in and about whole systems, and (frankly) sufficient general intelligence that connections among all those things just pop into my head. I also seem to be above-average at explaining concepts to others, at writing generally, and other developers on my teams are usually really happy with library interfaces, APIs, and similar things I design & build (see again: good taste).

Meanwhile, during the act of writing code, I crib off existing code to remember how the hell method invocation looks in the current language I'm writing and similar important details. If I haven't touched a language in 3 months I very likely can't FizzBuzz without syntax errors or using the wrong function somewhere or whatever. I put Go on my résumé because I have written quite a bit of it, and can talk to someone fluently about the parts that are likely to seem odd to a newcomer and some of its strengths and weaknesses, but without some cramming ahead of time or a cheatsheet I probably can't demonstrate a bit of that in code. I'll likely mess up keyword order and all kinds of basic things just trying to "hello world".

In short: I've realized, later than I probably should have, I need to get the fuck out of development per se and into something that's still basically developing software since I'm actually pretty good at that, but doesn't judge me on whether I can, in the moment, recall what a print statement looks like in a language I was writing literally yesterday (it's entirely possible I'll blank on stuff like that!). In my defense I've been easily landing jobs doing this stuff since I was 15 so my blinders were, I feel, well justified—it'd just not occurred to me previously that I might shine better, at least in interviews, which is kinda important, by seeking roles a bit adjacent to development rather than in the thick of it, until I got mumble mumble years in the field and started to think about what I'll be doing when I'm, you know, not even sort of young anymore.

[EDIT] and yeah, of course I could put together Anki decks and do daily drills to get better at the parts I'm bad at and it'd certainly help, but another part of this series of mid-career revelations I've had is that if you find yourself wondering why other people are having trouble with something that's easy to you, that's what you should put your effort into, and conversely, if you can find some way to ignore the parts you find harder than most people seem to (not always possible and sometimes you just have to work on things you suck at, sure, talking about ideally) then you should do so, to free up more time for the easy-to-you-but-not-others stuff.