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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

#151

Post by swader999 »

_qulr wrote: post #120
mayoff wrote: post #94

You're complaining that, to get a job, you have to demonstrate your ability to do the job, in a standardized way so the employer can compare you to other candidates with the merest hint of objectivity. For a little (imperfect) contrast, here's a quote from an article about auditioning for the Baltimore Symphony: > In the audition I took in October of 2014 for the Baltimore Symphony, I began preparing the required aud…

> with the merest hint of objectivity That's all it is. Superficial objectivity. Auditions are not a good analogy. Programmers are not stage performers. We're usually sitting alone in front of a keyboard. That's where we do our best work. Not with others standing over our shoulders, holding our entire fate in their hands, ready to kick us out the door if they're displeased in any way in the moment.

Yeah this is tough I agree and I've been on both sides and felt this pain.

On the bright side a very excellent means of hiring and finding new work is through colleagues you've worked with in the past. So do good work and keep in touch with past people you've worked with.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#152

Post by dhairya »

dhairya wrote: post #135
wendyshu wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this addresses geebee's point -- what makes you so sure struggling on programming puzzles implies incompetence on the job?

we're not asking programming puzzles. i described our process above. struggling to define a function and basic code comprehension (e.g. tracing a for loop that traverses a json object in candidate's preferred language) is a strong signal that candidate is not a good fit a mid to senior level for us. If it was a junior level position, sure you can learn on the job.

in our case, the problem is a highly simplified version of functionality in our code base and is close to being representative of work they'd be doing if hired.

i actually don't disagree with the prior poster. Technical interviews are highly variable and it's frustrating to go through poor interview processes. I've got bad interview stories as well. Being on the other side of table now, we're always interested in learning about better approaches hiring. Would love hear what has worked well for others.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#153

Post by wolco »

salt-licker wrote: post #144
_qulr wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I cannot give every application 1-2 hours of review if I get 100+ resumes. This is perhaps the biggest misconception of hiring, that out of some misguided notion of "fairness" or "objectivity" you have to treat every candidate exactly the same. In theory it seems like a good principle, but the road to hell is paved in good intentions. In practice, this results in arbitrarily designed standard tests which are only s…

Generally you don’t get all the resumes at once, this is literally the secretary problem. Unfortunately you need some objective standard of measurement across candidates that is static over at least months, and ideally takes a minimum of you and your candidates’ time. Though imperfect, real-time technical questions are a pretty good solution to this problem, especially since a lot of the best engineers prefer them to…

Are you sure? I mean the 10 years of success spent over various companies projects on resumes have a high false rate because after they took your coding test they didn't do as well as you thought they should? Did you hire any of them and did they out perform your initial assessment.

If you didn't hire them and compare them to new hires who have bad resumes but did well on your test how would you know?

You can't objectivity judge a candidate by your test results only. Otherwise your test is just randomly filtering people. Until you do that you don't know how effective your test is. You could be flipping a coin and getting the same results.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#154

Post by lol768 »

cheonic729 wrote: post #109
spamizbad wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who had administered dozens of "objective" coding challenges to non-native english speakers... I can guarantee you your language skills will negatively impact your performance. So those tests aren't as objective as you think. It comes up with questions that are as simple as "Create a function that deduplicates an array of integers"

> I can guarantee you your language skills will negatively impact your performance. As it should. If someone is a poor English speaker, at an English-speaking company, they absolutely should be penalized. Not everyone is equal, was equal, nor will be. Some people are born blind too. Shouldn't we adjust our hiring practices for them too?

> Some people are born blind too. Shouldn't we adjust our hiring practices for them too?

Not only should we adjust our hiring practices for blind applicants, there's a legal obligation to make "reasonable adjustments" for these candidates under the Equality Act! *

* Laws may vary in less developed jurisdictions.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#155

Post by data_spy »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #124

Work sample tests have been proven repeatedly to be the best predictor of future job success.[1] The next best predictor is general mental ability. It's not unreasonable to ask someone to demonstrate their capabilities. Just make it interesting, relevant to the job and most importantly: short. Whatever time work sample testing requires should replace interview time, not add on to it. 2 hours is a reasonable ask. Oh,…

The best test predictor from the research I read is prior work performance at prior companies.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#156

Post by lhorie »

autarch wrote: post #50

> "I’m writing this as an interviewee, having never been on the other side of the interview table ..." > ... > "Most candidates will have side-projects or work they’ve done for previous employers." As someone who has actually done a lot of interviewing, I can say with great confidence that this is simply wrong. At my current employer, we have a "homework assignment" as part of the interview process. We tell candidate…

I'd say "work they've done for previous employers" is something that nearly every candidate with industry experience has. The problem is that when I ask about it, candidates often are terrible at communicating what the work consisted of: often they focus on microscopic minutiae that appears disconnected from the big picture (e.g. gloating about gluing some trivial library as if that's a big accomplishment, when the position is for a senior engineer) or they demonstrate apathy/lack of proactiveness (e.g. some variation of "I just did what I was told") or they ramble incoherently, etc.

And this is supposed to be one of those bog-standard question that interviewees are always told by job interview guides to be prepared for!

I agree that people that have OSS work to show are much rarer to come by, and FWIW, they tend to do better in interviews IME. My theory is that it's not that the OSS resume bullet point itself sets them apart, but rather that they polished their skills more through the hard work they put into their OSS projects.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#157

Post by Karupan »

I get the general feeling that people on both sides of an interview want it to be exactly what they want it to be. That never happens. There are problems with the way tech interviews are conducted now, and we should aim to fix it. But human biases will always apply just like every other thing in life.

My rule for interviews (whether as an interviewer or interviewee) is simple:

1. Explain/ask for the exact process and stages during the first call.

2. Raise any concerns as soon as possible.

3. Be ready for either outcome - if your concerns are reasonable and addressed, go ahead. If not, don’t.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#158

Post by zapt02 »

autarch wrote: post #50

> "I’m writing this as an interviewee, having never been on the other side of the interview table ..." > ... > "Most candidates will have side-projects or work they’ve done for previous employers." As someone who has actually done a lot of interviewing, I can say with great confidence that this is simply wrong. At my current employer, we have a "homework assignment" as part of the interview process. We tell candidate…

This is on-point! I've been involved in the recruitment process at my current employer for years and 95% of people that make it past the initial recruiter meet-and-greet have absolutely nothing to show in terms of open-source contributions or personal projects. Most of them just do the homework assignment so that you can at least talk about something during the interview.

You can always say it's because the company doesn't attract good enough candidates, but good luck with that in a competitive dev market in a large european capital.

I appreciate the authors honesty in his obliviousness of being on "the other side of the table" and I think it's clear that the author is living in a bubble that doesn't correspond to reality for people recruiting.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#159

Post by salt-licker »

_qulr wrote: post #148
salt-licker wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally you don’t get all the resumes at once, this is literally the secretary problem. Unfortunately you need some objective standard of measurement across candidates that is static over at least months, and ideally takes a minimum of you and your candidates’ time. Though imperfect, real-time technical questions are a pretty good solution to this problem, especially since a lot of the best engineers prefer them to…

> Surprising numbers of engineers look great on paper but can’t write working code when tested, even accounting for interview anxiety. How have you accounted for interview anxiety?

It’s definitely not an exact science.

1. I try to make the parameters of the interview as friendly as possible — language of their choice, don’t have to worry about code style or computational complexity, or talk while they’re coding, just write working code that solves the problem. They can use google freely. I’m there as a resource to talk through their solution, answer questions, and help them get unstuck if needed.

2. The algorithm to solve the question doesn’t require a trick and there are many viable solutions so most candidates can verbally explain to me a working algorithm quickly, +- a couple edge cases.

3. Candidates often get visibly flustered or hung up on irrelevant details, or unsure what exactly I want for them, and I focus on noticing this. I try to guide them down a correct path if they’re close and tell them not to over-architect if they start doing that.

Despite all this, too manly candidates do not have a dependable metaprocess for writing working code - a common scenario is they write code, it gives the wrong result, they drop some print statements to debug, but can’t effectively trace the program to figure out why they’re getting the debug output and so they guess and try to fix the wrong thing, causing further problems. I know that some of this is nerves but it can’t account for all of it.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#160

Post by chrisfosterelli »

autarch wrote: post #50

> "I’m writing this as an interviewee, having never been on the other side of the interview table ..." > ... > "Most candidates will have side-projects or work they’ve done for previous employers." As someone who has actually done a lot of interviewing, I can say with great confidence that this is simply wrong. At my current employer, we have a "homework assignment" as part of the interview process. We tell candidate…

We've done something similar and found even candidates that do have public side projects may not feel those projects fully represent the code they'd write today and preferred the takehome.
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