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I don’t have time for coding challenges

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Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#21

Post by bdcravens »

geebee wrote: post #12
ergocoder wrote: post #5

Then, don't. I want to move from my 2000 USD a month (this is a good salary already) in a 3rd world country to a FAANG that pays 20k USD per month. I'm willing to go through any challenge because the reward is superb for me. Not to mention, without objective interview questions, an introverted non-native English speaker (who doesn't speak latin-germanic-based language) like me would fail most of these subjective ques…

That's why people do it, no doubt. Keep in mind, a lot of these questions are asked by vastly less desirable companies that ape the hiring practices of FAANG, even though they pay much less. And these companies complain bitterly about a shortage of good developers to hire. So... I'm all onboard with your statement, but I think you only said half of it. Nobody owes me a job, and if I don't like it, I'm free to not get…

> a lot of these questions are asked by vastly less desirable companies that ape the hiring practices of FAANG, even though they pay much less

I was asked to do a coding exercise for a tiny ($2500 if memory is correct) freelance project.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#22

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

Many of the author's suggested alternatives clearly fail on the stated reasons why coding challenges are bad. Asking pertinent questions is clearly arbitrary; probationary periods are non-inclusive to candidates who are relocating or need a visa; asking candidates to "build something - anything" would be substantially more time consuming for engineers in many specialties. (How am I supposed to build a small demo app to show off my systems programming ability?)

It's hard for me to escape the conclusion that the author's just trying to universalize their personal preferences.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#23

Post by luckylion »

geebee wrote: post #12
ergocoder wrote: post #5

Then, don't. I want to move from my 2000 USD a month (this is a good salary already) in a 3rd world country to a FAANG that pays 20k USD per month. I'm willing to go through any challenge because the reward is superb for me. Not to mention, without objective interview questions, an introverted non-native English speaker (who doesn't speak latin-germanic-based language) like me would fail most of these subjective ques…

That's why people do it, no doubt. Keep in mind, a lot of these questions are asked by vastly less desirable companies that ape the hiring practices of FAANG, even though they pay much less. And these companies complain bitterly about a shortage of good developers to hire. So... I'm all onboard with your statement, but I think you only said half of it. Nobody owes me a job, and if I don't like it, I'm free to not get…

Do only those companies complain about a shortage of candidates? Because in the tech centers I know, the market is just empty. Lots of large companies are competing for talent, and if you can't pay bank salaries, you're going to have a hard time.

You make it sound like there's plenty of talent around but companies are being snobbish. That's not my experience at all in Germany.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#24

Post by cosmotic »

I've done 5 coding challenges, I deemed each one a success on my end, none resulted in a job. A few resulted in a third interview which revealed numerous additional red flags.

At this point I consider a coding challenge a deal breaker. I'm not doing one, and if you ask, there's a near certain chance I wouldn't want to work in an environment that thinks they are a good idea.

If you're interested in my abilities, I'd be happy to spend an hour walking through something I've already worked on in the past.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#25

Post by geofft »

shock wrote: post #19
lxe wrote: post #8

> Have a probationary period That seems very taxing on the company. I'd rather screen the candidate before committing to anything via interview/coding challenge, etc... The take-home coding challenge seems like a good idea -- less pressure than coding during the interview and allows the interviewer to assess the "real life" performance. > Ask them to build something – anything! That's great, but a big part of working…

> That seems very taxing on the company. I'd rather screen the candidate before committing to anything via interview/coding challenge So having a probationary period is too expensive for the company, but a several hours coding challenge for the developer is a OK? In my experience when a candidate was a bad fit, it was because of soft skills/personality traits not technical chops (which are much easier to learn than s…

The developer is eventually joining the company, no?

I didn't like spending probably about 5 hours total on coding challenges last time I interviewed, and I've been internally opposing them, but as the candidate who interviewed, I'm much happier having dealt with it once and gotten over it than having probationary employees show up on my team for a week every so often and having to drop what I'm working on to work with them and evaluate them.

> In my experience when a candidate was a bad fit, it was because of soft skills/personality traits not technical chops (which are much easier to learn than soft skills).

This is a good point, and argues in favor of traditional interviewing (establishing a rapport with the candidate etc.) over any sort of "challenge" IMO. I don't think I'll learn more about soft skills in a week than I would in an hour - the complex stuff generally takes several weeks for the new hire to be properly onboarded and contributing, anyway.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#27

Post by geebee »

luckylion wrote: post #23
geebee wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why people do it, no doubt. Keep in mind, a lot of these questions are asked by vastly less desirable companies that ape the hiring practices of FAANG, even though they pay much less. And these companies complain bitterly about a shortage of good developers to hire. So... I'm all onboard with your statement, but I think you only said half of it. Nobody owes me a job, and if I don't like it, I'm free to not get…

Do only those companies complain about a shortage of candidates? Because in the tech centers I know, the market is just empty. Lots of large companies are competing for talent, and if you can't pay bank salaries, you're going to have a hard time. You make it sound like there's plenty of talent around but companies are being snobbish. That's not my experience at all in Germany.

In San Francisco, there's plenty of tech talent available at 500k a year. There's remarkably little available at minimum wage, though.

Complaining to congress that there is a shortage of IT talent is so common in American politics that it has become its own unique form of performance art. For instance, during the magic section of the act, companies make a labor shortage magically appear without any mention of wages, while also magically making the laws of supply and demand disappear.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#28

Post by gmadsen »

syspec wrote: post #6

The proposed solution to me, is much worse. > Ask them to build something – anything! > Instead of a coding challenge, ask them to spend a short time building something they enjoy, and talk about what they did and why. To me this would be a MUCH more difficult task. A blank canvas is much harder to work with, and downright frightening. Constraints foster creativity. Having everyone code the same thing helps the inter…

heavily dependent on the job as well. not all software engineers are tinkerers solving basic problems in their lives.

I code state of the art motion planning, localization, and robotic algorithms. some of this requires more than a day of tooling around at home building a project

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#30

Post by 52-6F-62 »

I'm of the opinion that if there needs to be some objective technical challenge to determine a baseline of competency (and there are very many, very strong arguments for that) then there need to be standards.

I've encountered so many variables (no pun intended) in technical interviews that I've virtually stopped preparing. There's hardly any way to prepare when the field is so large and you never really know what you're going to be tested on.

I've had people challenge me on theoretical system-time timezone conversions (and incorrectly mark my correct answer wrong "because of physics"...), beside reimplementing native JavaScript functions, beside complex algorithmic problems, beside toy problems like building a binary calculator. [That's great if you learn I can rig a web page for adding 100 and 101, but how do you know if I know anything about databases for this back end position]

And those interviews were all for working with web tech, in a couple of the cases just front end positions.

There needs to be a common, limited standard and/or domain-specific standards.

It's really counter-intuitive to me, and I don't understand how it benefits the hiring process, if a company is looking for a web-back-end engineer for what is essentially a complex crud app and wants to propose the candidate solves a problem from a domain they've never worked in—and marking them on the correctness of the answer, rather than the work process.

I'm for objective, technical challenges. But I've seen enough that it seems apparent to me that it's broken.

(addendum: I've had several good interviews as well, and good interviewers. I had a good one recently as well that was fitting for the domain. They're not all bad, but most seem to be in my experience)

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