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

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#221

Post by ProZsolt » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 11:32 AM UTC

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…

That's why even though I like take home tests I only willing to do them after I had the first round of technical interview. I always pass these type of test, that's why I like it at the end of the pipeline.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#222

Post by juped » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 11:46 AM UTC

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…

Interviewers react badly if you try to describe the high-level thought processes you go through, because that's not "technical" or "coding". So you end up reaching for dumb bullshit like gluing some library or whatever the fuck, because coding is actually boring grind work that you want to do as little of as possible, as stupidly as possible, and there actually isn't anything interesting to say to these people if you did the engineering right.

If that's not you, then you need to be painfully, painfully explicit about it, and some people still won't believe you because interviewers just lie all the time.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#223

Post by non-entity » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 12:12 PM UTC

egsmi wrote: post #200

One thing I always wonder, how do other professions do it? Do civil engineers have to make a building? Do chemists have to assay a sample? What makes programming so unique?

Well for one you wont see Chemists or Civil Engineers from the variety of backgrounds developers come from. It's near impossible to become one without the degree.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#224

Post by _qulr » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 12:28 PM UTC

jjav wrote: post #202

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. 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 i…

> you need to write better job descriptions

Tech job postings are the absolute worst. Anyone who's having trouble with hiring in any way needs to start there. Everyone in tech knows that job postings are a joke, which is why you're told to apply to jobs even if you're not qualified, and then companies complain about the applicant pool. It's their own fault!

The "excuse" is almost always "HR". But this just tells the applicant your company is a bureaucratic nightmare that few sane applicants would want to join.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#225

Post by _qulr » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 12:55 PM UTC

_qulr wrote: post #224

jjav wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

> you need to write better job descriptions Tech job postings are the absolute worst. Anyone who's having trouble with hiring in any way needs to start there. Everyone in tech knows that job postings are a joke, which is why you're told to apply to jobs even if you're not qualified, and then companies complain about the applicant pool. It's their own fault! The "excuse" is almost always "HR". But this just tells the…

There's a lot of worry in tech hiring about the "faker", the engineer who lies or exaggerates on their résumé.

The irony is that the tech hiring process, especially the job postings, encourage the fakers to apply. You're practically beginning fakers to apply.

The most honest, scrupulous people tend to only apply for jobs where they're 100% qualified according to the job posting. So the system, which hires people who don't actually meet the listed qualifications, is systematically selecting against the honest applicants. Honest people can even be driven out of tech in virtue of being honest.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#226

Post by wakawaka1 » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:12 PM UTC

ProZsolt wrote: post #217

zebnyc wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) Do you compensate folks who take these challenges. Otherwise it is half a day of unpaid labor. Also most take home tests take way longer even though they are advertised as "only a couple of hours". Do you have empirical evidence that it can be completed in the given time slot? Have you given the test to your own colleagues who may not know the background / domain knowledge / environment setup required? b) Do you m…

Not OP, just a job seeker who like coding interview. > Otherwise it is half a day of unpaid labor. The same true for an interview > Do you have empirical evidence that it can be completed in the given time slot? As a candidate once you see the specification and you think it's not worth it you can easily can say no to it. > Is there a guarantee that an actual person will review the submitted code and provide feedback?…

> Otherwise it is half a day of unpaid labor.

>> The same true for an interview

Who does half day interviews? In my 3 years as a professional software dev, I've perhaps spent a cumulative 2 hours in interviews with a company. I know that some companies have extensive interviews. But they aren't as laborious as intensely grinding on a mentally challenging project in an industry such as software.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#227

Post by ryandrake » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:39 PM 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…

How do you "quickly go through" a stack of 100 resumes and choose a handful of top candidates in a way that is not subject to personal (conscious or unconscious) bias?

I remember an interview training exercise, which also covered resume screening. Each person got the same stack of resumes, and the instructor said, "You have 60 seconds to pick out the top 3 you'd like to bring in for an interview. Find them." At the end of the exercise we found that we all basically picked out people who were a lot like us. White people picked out "whiter-sounding" names, women picked more women, etc. Also, Ken Thompson's resume was one of them (with a different name) and nobody picked him.

I think the point was that human eyeballs and brains are terrible at objectively or fairly pre-filtering.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#228

Post by autarch » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:43 PM UTC

jjav wrote: post #202

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. 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 i…

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

Remote roles get a _lot_ more applications than on site. In my experience getting 100 applications is quite common for such a role.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#229

Post by ryandrake » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:47 PM UTC

decafninja wrote: post #110

geebee wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Currently in NY making 150k with 10yoe at a non-tech company. Would jump ship in a heartbeat to SF for 300k, or 250k, or even 200k.

This legendary meme that everyone in SF is making 300k and drives a Ferrari has taken on a life of its own, and now we even have people outside of the Bay Area believing and repeating it. This is an outlier compensation for senior people at outlier companies. Anyone would jump ship for it, but it's not like hundreds of companies are handing out these salaries at the airport when you land.

Re: I don’t have time for coding challenges

#230

Post by paledot » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:48 PM UTC

My employer carved out a standalone PHP script from a dark corner of a legacy application years ago. We show it to candidates and talk through what they'd do differently. I like it because I can judge not just the candidate's technical competence, but their level as well. If you're a junior, I can see if you have an eye for detail and pick up on the database query with a syntax error or mistyped variable name. If you're more senior, you'll tell me about job queues and workers. I had one candidate start with "the problem is the management structure that allowed this to happen in the first place". I have plenty of leading questions for candidates who are hesitant to criticize our code, and will tear it to pieces in front of them if necessary.

And no, most importantly, it's not a take-home exam.