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Please stop the coding challenges

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Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#151

Post by nerdponx »

ryandrake wrote: post #110
paxys wrote: post #75

The more people online complain about coding interviews, the more confident I am that they are the absolute best way to filter candidates for a software development job. Across the industry there are way too many talkers/pretenders/meeting schedulers and not enough people who can roll up their sleeves, jump into the code and actually get stuff done. And this problem becomes worse at higher levels. You can bitch about…

Yea, I happen to hate coding challenges, but not because they're hard--because they bias towards "people who have time to do coding challenges". That said you're absolutely right about how many phonies are in the industry and coding tests are probably the best we have to weed them out.

The problem I see in a lot of cases is putting too much emphasis on solving the problem in the interview, instead of working through it. Many interviewers claim that they care more about the latter, but in practice failing at the former ends up disqualifying you.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#152

Post by mhog_hn »

MiguelX413 wrote: post #145

Tech jobs should be more like interviews instead, rather than making interviews more like tech jobs. I'd rather solve algorithmic puzzles all day.

Can we create an abstraction on top of modern day CRUD work and turn it into the solving of algorithmic puzzles?

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#153

Post by ericmcer »

liontwist wrote: post #4

Remember that in other fields like medicine, finance, academia, and law, getting in involves 5+ years of hoop jumping and commitment signaling that have nothing to do with the final job. We are blessed.

I have a couple family members who are doctors. Medical school and residency were nightmares, but after that they are golden. One of them works one week a month and makes 400k. Others have pretty cushy 9-5s and are taking home ludicrous salaries. They are also pretty recession proof and their salaries are fairly immune to economic pressures. I don't think mass doctor layoffs happened in 2008 or 2022.

With software you never have to stop proving yourself, and your skillset is always a few years away from being outdated. A doctor with 20 years of experience would be welcomed anywhere, but an engineer with 20 years experience is viewed with trepidation. The next "big thing" could roll out at anytime and suddenly crypto engineers are getting 800k job offers so everyone furiously tries to learn crypto stuff. A few years later that all dries up and now you have 100k engineers who are out of work and learned tech that no one cares about anymore. All the LLM engineers might be in the same position next year.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#154

Post by agentultra »

> When was the last time you had to debug an ancient codebase without documentation or help from a team?

All the time. 300-400k SLOC in C++. Legacy in the sense that there were no tests of any kind. Little-to-no documentation. Solo developer at the tiny company. Fix bugs and add features while keeping the system available to the tens of thousands of users.

A more recent example: here’s a patch for a critical feature we need. It was written over a year ago. The original author isn’t available anymore. You can write the code from scratch or try to resurrect the patch against master.

Being able to jump into a project and lead people towards some goal is definitely a skill for senior developer positions. Yes, you generally have a team you can lean on and have the ability to do research and all that. But how do you show that you can do all that in an interview?

Agree with the conclusion that a good thing to test for is for problem-solving.

The tech side depends a lot on what you’re doing. Although it gets ridiculous and organizations get lazy with this part. You don’t need to be white boarding graph algorithms for a junior web developer role. If your application is a social networking role and you’re interviewing a senior developer or architect? Definitely. They’re going to be teaching this stuff and need to understand it at a deep level.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#155

Post by jedberg »

lijok wrote: post #38

> When was the last time you had to debug an ancient codebase without documentation or help from a team? > This is like asking a Ruby developer to debug PHP as a test of flexibility > If the job requires specific tech skills, test those skills Sounds like someone failed a coding challenge. In all seriousness, you need to understand that companies rarely implement their hiring practices for the sake of it. It is usual…

> In all seriousness, you need to understand that companies rarely implement their hiring practices for the sake of it. It is usually the best their collective minds could come up with.

Unlikely. It's usually what the most senior person either read about or experienced in the past. In fact I'd say that it is highly unlikely that they did any introspection at all as to what they are actually trying to accomplish.

They just did it like everyone else because they believe exactly what you do -- that someone somewhere created the process with intention.

I feel like we've so lost the plot with tech hiring that we settled on what appears at best to be a local maxima.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#156

Post by loeg »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #72

A small anecdote. A partner of a friend quit their job earlier this year. They then took 4-6 weeks to prepare for each interview with Big Tech companies (4-6 weeks for Meta, 4-6 weeks for Stripe, etc.). Along the way, they also took random interviews just to practice and build muscle memory. They would grind leetcode several hours a day after researching which questions were likely to be encountered at each Big Tech.…

I took a similar approach -- took 6 weeks off doing interview prep, then concurrently applied to three FAANG employers. Got offers from all three, the worst of which was a 36% raise over my former non-FAANG job.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#157

Post by swatcoder »

paxys wrote: post #77
CharlieDigital wrote: post #72

A small anecdote. A partner of a friend quit their job earlier this year. They then took 4-6 weeks to prepare for each interview with Big Tech companies (4-6 weeks for Meta, 4-6 weeks for Stripe, etc.). Along the way, they also took random interviews just to practice and build muscle memory. They would grind leetcode several hours a day after researching which questions were likely to be encountered at each Big Tech.…

Sounds like the system worked exactly as intended then. A seemingly smart person got a good job. What's the problem with this story exactly?

"Seemingly smart person getting a good job" is a criteria for filling headcount during a boom, but regresses the industry's maturity by placing inexperienced people into critical roles.

The problem with this story is that people need to work with and rely on this person for responsibilities they're not yet qualified to meet. In some cases, a "smart person" will be able to grow into the role, but the road there is long and messy, which becomes a frustration for colleagues, supervisors, clients, users etc.

Because of the prolonged boom we just went through, the industry -- especially at FAANG's -- is now saturated with smart, naive people trying to fake it until they make it, leading to a gross decline in quality and consistency compared to where we have been and might otherwise be.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#158

Post by FartyMcFarter »

> When was the last time you had to debug an ancient codebase without documentation or help from a team?

Pretty much all the time. I also found that debugging things without asking for too much help was a great way to learn the systems involved, which eventually made me a better and more useful programmer, with more domain knowledge.

Granted not everyone has the luxury to spend time doing this, but I don't think it's that rare. In many cases it's even what companies want you to do, when that documentation or help is simply unavailable.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#159

Post by rectang »

pmg101 wrote: post #89
paxys wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the system worked exactly as intended then. A seemingly smart person got a good job. What's the problem with this story exactly?

A moderately smart person was selected for a good job perhaps over many many better possible hires simply because that person had the leisure to learn the game. Inefficient. But nice for that individual, naturally.

Recall this anecdote the next time someone mentions "meritocracy" in the context of tech. At best, only a limited population gets to participate.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#160

Post by Tainnor »

d2049 wrote: post #36

> build a mini-app from scratch in just a few hours It depends on what kind of functionality we're talking about, but this kind of task is exactly what people at my current startup have been assigned at times. It is absolutely possible to build a CRUD web app with reactive UI using modern tools in a few hours. > This is like asking a Ruby developer to debug PHP as a test of flexibility Again it depends on what the de…

> is absolutely possible to build a CRUD web app with reactive UI using modern tools in a few hours.

Yes, but it also leads to tons of bikeshedding. "Should I implement a linter? Should I write unit tests? Integration tests? Should I mock HTTP calls or use a mock server? How should I deploy things? How do I structure my CI?" All these choices are extremely subjective and context dependent and then somebody's gonna pass on you because they don't like that you used Cucumber.

Setting up a project is not something you do often, and if you do, you probably have templates and some team standards.

It's much better to give somebody a project structure and ask them to implement some basic task in it.

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