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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

#161

Post by scubbo »

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…

> 20k USD per month

As someone who's been in a FAANG for nearly 8 years and is making 2/5 of that...where the hell did you find that position!?

EDIT: oh wait. I was comparing my take-home salary. You're probably describing gross total comp? In which case - yeah, that makes sense. Good luck!

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#162

Post by salt-licker »

wolco wrote: post #153
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…

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 objec…

I’ve hired people who have not passed the coding screen (but did pass subsequent interviews) and they’ve been some of my best hires. But the type of failure really matters. Did they write generally correct code but ran out of time because the algorithm they came up with under time pressure was too complicated? Or did they fail to debug a list indexing off-by-one error, even after printing the list repeatedly? It’s sometimes a judgement call but I believe there’s a lot of signal in watching people write code in real-time

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#163

Post by UweSchmidt »

shajznnckfke wrote: post #142
UweSchmidt wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes no sense. A voluntary pay reduction is like a subsidy leading to market distortion (more supply than the market can bear) and windfall gains (employers might just keep the extra profits) - only that this subsidy is coming from your and my paycheck lol . The idea is an employer-side argument to counter the labour-side demand for higher wages: Don't have the wages to high, otherwise we go bankrupt and can't…

I didn’t say anything about a voluntary reduction in pay. Any reduction in pay would be a result of market forces in response to increased supply. > Look at construction. Did cheap immigrant labour make rents feel low in many areas? No, market forces drive up prices and owners keep the profit. In areas that aren’t constrained by density limits, homes are actually very cheap. In terms of square footage of home per pop…

Market forces should have already brought in more people into software if they really are that high, bringing down the salaries. What other measure would you suggest? Importing supply from abroad? Whatever it is, it would lead to a reduction in pay, which you suprisingly support - that amounts to walking into your boss' office and asking for a pay reduction.

> In areas that aren’t constrained by density limits, homes are actually very cheap.

That's the point. The effect of cheap construction labor only affects the rent prices in some areas, in other areas owners pocket the extra profit - while making construction jobs largely untenable except for immigrants coming from poverty.

I suspect something similar could play out in the software field.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#164

Post by zebnyc »

opportune wrote: post #104

This person has admittedly never even done a whiteboard interview or given an interview. Why are we upvoting this drivel to the front page? Boohoo, you have to spend a couple hours proving you know data structures to get a new job. Give me a break.

Let us assume a random candidate Mary who is batting at 20%, i.e., she passes to the next stage on every 5th attempt. Now if we follow the typical interview loop

a) Take home test b) Phone screen c) Onsite d) Offer

How many take home tests does Mary have to take to get 1 offer? The answer is 125 and if each is 2 hours then 250 hours. So a single test in isolation may not seem like a big deal but if every company had their own criteria and take home exams as a pre-qualifier, the candidate would face a uphill battle to find work.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#165

Post by _qulr »

salt-licker wrote: post #159
_qulr wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 neede…

> I know that some of this is nerves but it can’t account for all of it.

Why not?

If you've never experienced severe situational anxiety, you may not know how debilitating it can be.

And then, maddeningly, perhaps just minutes after the interview is over, you return to your "normal" self, and start to think about what you would have done in that situation if you weren't nervous.

It's basically stage fright, which can be terrifying if you're not used to the stage.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#166

Post by autarch »

lhorie wrote: post #156
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 p…

Just to clarify, I thought the author of the linked piece was suggesting that people could share actual code from previous employers somehow. Of course it's reasonable to ask people about their past work in an interview and to expect them to speak about it coherently.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#167

Post by autarch »

chrisfosterelli wrote: post #160
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.

Good point. I'm sure some of the candidates who do our assignment have stuff on GitHub or elsewhere, but thought they could do better work with the assignment.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#168

Post by opportune »

zebnyc wrote: post #164
opportune wrote: post #104

This person has admittedly never even done a whiteboard interview or given an interview. Why are we upvoting this drivel to the front page? Boohoo, you have to spend a couple hours proving you know data structures to get a new job. Give me a break.

Let us assume a random candidate Mary who is batting at 20%, i.e., she passes to the next stage on every 5th attempt. Now if we follow the typical interview loop a) Take home test b) Phone screen c) Onsite d) Offer How many take home tests does Mary have to take to get 1 offer? The answer is 125 and if each is 2 hours then 250 hours. So a single test in isolation may not seem like a big deal but if every company had…

I mean, my takeaway from that is that Mary is not a very good candidate, not that there is something broken with the interview process. She only needs so many interviews because she has a low success rate. Most people aren't doing nearly that many interviews in an actual job search.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#169

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

johnfn wrote: post #149
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…

Them: "We've got a coding challenge for you..." Me: "I've got this repo on Github with millions of downloads and 10k stars. It's at least 20k lines of my own code. Would that be good to demonstrate my coding ability?" Them: "Haha, no, that'd be too much work for us. Please do the test instead." Me: "Fine." Then they rejected me because I used GET instead of POST. Clearly that shows I have no idea how to code. That wa…

Truly absurd. Followed the link in your profile. You wrote VSCodeVim! 49,674++/14,291--. And because you used the "wrong" HTTP verb. Did they also say you should have used tabs instead of spaces?? Outrageous.

By the way, thanks for VCCodeVim!

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#170

Post by nilkn »

duutfhhh wrote: post #103
tick_tock_tick wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only 240k probably not for a base salary but total comp sure.

Well, I have a bridge to sell you if you believe it's total comp.

That's perfectly in line with expectations for a new inexperienced hire at a FAANG. If anything, it's a little high for entry-level even at these companies. Obviously much higher numbers are attainable via career progression or already having such a job to negotiate from as leverage.
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