I don’t have time for coding challenges • Hacker News Board

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#201

Post by 1123581321 » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 5:25 AM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #177

nogabebop23 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use a coding challenge as well but I like your addition of "auditing" the coding part and using existing open source or side project work. Bonus points if it uses some of the target technologies too! The author doesn't appear to understand the economics of the hiring company; it's about time & effort to filter and the cost of making a bad hire. I cannot give every application 1-2 hours of review if I get 100+ resu…

The commenter doesn't appear to understand the economics of the job-seeking candidate; it's about time & effort to keep your current job and the cost of getting hired at a bad company. I cannot give every company I apply at hours of coding if I apply to dozens of jobs. I can't give every company a half-day assessment. I can't get hired easily and then get fired easily. I can't invest weeks of work from myself on non-…

This is a snarky parody, but put together you are both just saying that you can only afford to spend any time on job matches likely to be especially good, but that you’ll spend a lot of time on the good ones. Which just means you both are in an illiquid or conservative hiring market that is out of your control and their control to change.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#202

Post by jjav » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 6:56 AM UTC

nogabebop23 wrote: post #79

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 use a coding challenge as well but I like your addition of "auditing" the coding part and using existing open source or side project work. Bonus points if it uses some of the target technologies too! The author doesn't appear to understand the economics of the hiring company; it's about time & effort to filter and the cost of making a bad hire. I cannot give every application 1-2 hours of review if I get 100+ resu…

> I cannot give every application 1-2 hours of review if I get 100+ resumes.

Your process has already failed if you're considering 100+ people!

First, you should never be getting 100+ resumes for a role. If you are, you need to write better job descriptions and/or get a better recruiter who knows how to match to the job description.

With that in place, you (I) are getting about 10-20 resumes at most. Then what I do is read them and rank them. Takes less than two hours.

I'll only interview the top five from this stack. I'm happy to give each of these five people however many hours of attention it takes, they and I deserve it.

This way the people who didn't get to the interview round have not wasted any of their time which is the most respectful way to handle it.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#203

Post by jjav » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 6:57 AM UTC

_qulr wrote: post #115

nogabebop23 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use a coding challenge as well but I like your addition of "auditing" the coding part and using existing open source or side project work. Bonus points if it uses some of the target technologies too! The author doesn't appear to understand the economics of the hiring company; it's about time & effort to filter and the cost of making a bad hire. I cannot give every application 1-2 hours of review if I get 100+ resu…

> 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…

> Don't do "screening" interviews. Only do "hiring" interviews.

Good way to put it. Exactly.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#204

Post by itronitron » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 6:57 AM UTC

dhairya wrote: post #53

itronitron wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For advanced roles I'd suggest separating out the evaluation of coding ability from the evaluation of a particular language. Let the candidate pick their language when you want to test how well they can write new code, and then do a separate evaluation of how deep they are on the language and technical stack you are using.

I agree with the sentiment. Honestly we don't check for syntax or even require the code to compile. We let the candidate write puesdo code which usally isn't super far python and javascript implementations of our challenge. We try to pay attention to the types of questions the candidates asks about context of the code and choices they make in designing a solution. That being said i'd be curious how you evaluate gener…

One of my previous managers would set up the white board interview for a candidate by giving them a simple problem application (not a course-grading system but similar) to draft out on the whiteboard an initial design. Then they would add in additional details/requirements in about three stages. So the candidate at some point would typically have to back track and revise some of their initial design to accommodate the new requirements.

It was a good measure of how well they communicated, how they dealt with undoing some of their prior work, and the process was fairly representative of the type of work involved in the position.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#205

Post by bitten » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 7:19 AM UTC

hysan wrote: post #183

golergka wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then they rejected me because I used GET instead of POST. OK, I'm honestly curious here. What was the request, and why did you make such a decision? Do you think it is the right approach in this case, or that it's an insignificant mistake that does not represent a person's understanding of HTTP protocol? I remember hearing about at least one story where using GET instead of POST lead to disastrous consequences, as…

Not the OP, but from my experience teaching web dev, one possible reason is nerves. I’ve seen some of the smartest students make that mistake on an assessment simply because they were under pressure. A simple conversation afterwards shows that they do understand the difference (as expected). In the moment though, sometimes you just have a brain fart.

Yep! I have been in similar situations where you make a mistake and you get out right rejected. Surely it's better to explain the mistake to me and then we can discuss it. This can also be a nice cultural check too, how well do I respond to my own mistakes? It's a shame most people don't follow your idea here.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#206

Post by luckylion » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 7:25 AM UTC

geebee wrote: post #146

luckylion wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all well and good, but that's not the point I was trying to make. Companies aren't having a hard time finding talent because developers are so annoyed by coding interviews, they're having a hard time finding talent because they can't/don't want to pay high salaries. So developers go to work on finance and ad-tech, and not on normal, boring, only-making-three-times-the-national-average-salary stuff. And those c…

I disagree with this, somewhat. Adam Smith, in Wealth of Nations, reminds us that there are a lot of factors that go into determining the desirability of a certain job, and that wages reflect this. The butcher earns more than the baker, Smith reasons, in part because most people would prefer the work of the baker. You have to pay someone enough more to convince them to be a butcher. There are a lot of jobs that pay l…

> The butcher earns more than the baker, Smith reasons, in part because most people would prefer the work of the baker. You have to pay someone enough more to convince them to be a butcher.

And the surveillance capitalism developer earns more than the entire village. Ergo the market commands us to all develop surveillance stuff so Saudi Arabia can spy on dissidents and then chop them up in their embassies.

But again, that's not the point I was making, it's weird that multiple people understand my comments as "we should remove the free market". Me saying that it's the market that is making it hard for normal companies to find talent is only the background for what I'm actually trying to get across: It's not the coding challenge that is making it hard to find developers.

A company that isn't in a hyper-profitable space like ad-tech or surveillance (watching employees during WFH is booming) or fintech (figuring out new ways to make people part with their money) won't be able to attract talent by removing a coding challenge. It's just not an important factor in the equation.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#207

Post by jjav » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 7:37 AM UTC

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…

> You're complaining that, to get a job, you have to demonstrate your ability to do the job

That's not generally what people complain in these interview threads. The complaint is that to get a software job one must demonstrate a performance skill 100% unrelated to the actual job.

It's as if a surgeon with 20 years experience in his specialty would be interviewed by making them balance chemical reaction equations. Sure, they studied that back in undergrad prior to med school but it's completely irrelevant to the job. But that's how we treat software interviewing.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#208

Post by goatinaboat » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 7:42 AM UTC

nogabebop23 wrote: post #79

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 use a coding challenge as well but I like your addition of "auditing" the coding part and using existing open source or side project work. Bonus points if it uses some of the target technologies too! The author doesn't appear to understand the economics of the hiring company; it's about time & effort to filter and the cost of making a bad hire. I cannot give every application 1-2 hours of review if I get 100+ resu…

The author doesn't appear to understand the economics of the hiring company; it's about time & effort to filter and the cost of making a bad hire. I cannot give every application 1-2 hours of review if I get 100+ resumes.

This is an entirely self-created problem, not for you personally, I mean for the industry. We are against "credentialling" so signals like personal recommendations, alma mater, or work history at prestigious firms are overlooked.

My employer tried Hackerrank for a while, we abandoned it when we realised that the candidates we really wanted (e.g. based on personal recommendations from existing employees) were dropping out of the pipeline as soon as the Hackerrank link was sent to them. And the ones we were getting were good at Hackerrank and not much else.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#209

Post by jjav » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 7:49 AM UTC

cyrux004 wrote: post #112

ijidak wrote: post #106

What I love (sarcasm) is companies that just need basic line of business apps, but want you to complete a coding challenge navigating graphs and trees in constant, nlogn time, etc. I find it hilarious and often ask, "Can you explain to me how solving this challenge applies to what you do day to day?" They say.... "That's a really good question..." Then I watch them squirm as they have no idea how to explain a real wo…

how about "we found a strong correlation between who can complete coding challenge do well on the job. We understand that correlation doesny imply causation; but we and the majority of the industry havent found anything better yet. We also understand that we are potentially missing out on good candidates who dont generally fare well in coding challenge; but thats a trade off we are ok with"

> how about "we found a strong correlation between who can complete coding challenge do well on the job.

But that would be a lie. So not a good way to start a (potential) working relationship.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#210

Post by UweSchmidt » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 7:50 AM UTC

shajznnckfke wrote: post #185

UweSchmidt wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I just think it’s useful to try to understand the effects of policies not just on me, but on society at large. For example, I might observe that a tax increase hurts me personally but helps others. Are you saying that instead I ought to come up with reas…

Currently there seems to be no mechanism increasing construction workers' wages or lowering rent. The extra profits are kept, and society isn't better for it (if it were, I'd be all for it like you). The reasons for this are fundamental, partly explained in an economics class, partly the result of imperfect markets and practicalities (a rich landlord might not immediately go out and build new real estate that would lower rents overall, he'd just sit on his boat).

My final point therefore is, let's keep IT salaries high for now.