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How to hire programmers using online coding test

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Re: How to hire programmers using online coding test

#21

Post by VLM »

Two hilarious observations about stereotypical business programming culture:

Before hiring, tech fit decisions are made by elaborate pretend tests and painfully detailed technical discussion upon people who supposedly needed to gain years of experience in a specific field. After hiring, tech fit decisions are made by a PHB glancing at the cover of PC magazine and saying "make it so, number one" and the existing staff starts googling furiously and supplies something workable in a week or two even if they never heard of the technology the day before.

At 2pm "Work at home, are you crazy? Without my direct supervision hovering over your shoulder I'd appear unnecessary and you can't be trusted to accomplish anything at home and nothing can ever be accomplished individually, things can only be done by a team where a sociopath will take all credit for the teams effort" or, uh, usually a little more carefully phrased but this is what they actually mean. But at 2am the tone changes "well of course you can work at home at 2am to fix any emergency all by yourself in a completely undocumented system you've never heard of before and we trust you'll always be available 24x365 and never out of town or drunk"

Re: How to hire programmers using online coding test

#22

Post by yozhik »

penguat wrote: post #9
lrem wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple programming task adds 20 minutes to the burden of the interviewee, costs you next to nothing and weeds out the folk who don't actually know how to program. If someone fails to print prime numbers below 100 in 20 minutes, there is something wrong with his skills.

And is this a buyer or a seller's market? If it's a buyer's market then you can give the interviewee as many tests as you like. If it's a seller's market... you'd better have something really good going for you!

I actually prefer working on a programming assignment when applying for new jobs. Most of my side project code is undocumented with few tests, so getting a coding assignment gives me the chance to prove that I do include those elements in paid work.

Re: How to hire programmers using online coding test

#23

Post by VLM »

twic wrote: post #18
7Figures2Commas wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Write program that prints prime numbers below 100. 2. ? 3. Profit! Interviews are a two-way street. If you're looking to hire an experienced developer and the best you can do is ask him to do something that he'll probably never have reason to do on the job, you're sending a pretty strong message about your company. If you're going to ask somebody to code (or solve a problem) as part of the interview process, there…

If the best you can do is to set a trivial programming problem, then indeed, that is deeply unimpressive. Happily, that is not what the article is suggesting, nor what anyone actually does. The article gives three steps: first, a trivial programming problem, second, a challenging programming problem (here delivered as homework), and thirdly, a face-to-face interview to check cultural fit. The purpose of the trivial p…

> check cultural fit.

I see lots of references to "culture" in hiring comments, so I'm not trying to call you specifically out, but what does it mean? It always bristles me, like if your criteria is "white men only need apply" well just outright say it, don't tiptoe around it. As a suggestion to anyone on HN who does hiring, if for example you're not going to hire my wife because of her ethnicity or because she's a woman, just put it in the job ad and save everyone involved a lot of time and tiptoeing around "culture".

Re: How to hire programmers using online coding test

#24

Post by potatolicious »

liranz wrote: post #2

This looks interesting, though I don't agree with the "most candidates cannot write code to simple algorithm" thesis. I interview A LOT. Almost 100% of the candidates I receive cover the basic programming abilities. The real problem is that they don't know how to THINK. I talk with them 20 min on the phone when they have to present a problem they had and how they solved it. Then I try to find out what they find inter…

There's a fence here - a bimodality if you will. I've been on both sides of it.

I used to do a large amount of phone screening for Amazon, probably over a hundred in all by the time I got sick of being a professional interviewer. I experienced much of what the author did: the bulk of the candidates had zero algorithms or data structures knowledge and could not program. Not "can't program well" or "can't program at a professional level", we're talking "I don't trust you with a simple shell script".

Now I work for a rather more obscure startup - we're relatively well known in the tech scene around here, but we're by a very long shot not a mainstream household name. The caliber of people that come through the door now is vastly different. I've interviewed some duds here, but have never interviewed someone in this position that just outright couldn't code.

The question I have for the author is who he hires for, and how much they pay. The low end of the software industry is plagued with people who have no business calling themselves programmers. It's really a vicious cycle - there's a large segment of our industry where the typical skill level is disastrously low, which causes ever more bureaucratic and ever more absurd filtering mechanisms to be invented, which further alienates programmers who have any real choice in employers.

Nowadays I'd be mildly insulted if given a FizzBuzz during an interview - but I used to do the same out of necessity, because 25% of my candidates couldn't pass it.

Re: How to hire programmers using online coding test

#25

Post by saching90 »

7Figures2Commas wrote: post #8

I always find it funny that half the people/companies advocating these approaches can't even keep a simple WordPress blog up when faced with a bit of traffic. Surely there must be an algorithm for that?

You spend day and night on building a product, you make sure everything works right and its scaled for traffic. Once you have a beta product ready, you decide to blog about it, you meticulously work on generating some good content, fire up a large instance on AWS, set up a wordpress blog, and the blog is live. Now you decide to post about it on HN, fortunately some people like what you have written, you start getting traffic.

And BOOM, suddenly you find out that the large instance on AWS, cannot handle the traffic, you are befuddled its not like the server is getting million hits/sec. You thought a large server would be enough to handle a single wordpress blog, and you realize that's not the case.

Now you go back and start fixing your self hosted wordpress blog, you feel sad that you missed out on audience because the server crashed, your work gets derailed because now you also have to maintain the blog server.

I agreed I too would have been irritated to see the link not working, but its not that you switch to an x-large instance each time you post a link on HN. Sometimes you just want somethings to work. But alas that's not the case.

Re: How to hire programmers using online coding test

#26

Post by 7Figures2Commas »

aetimmes wrote: post #14
7Figures2Commas wrote: post #8

I always find it funny that half the people/companies advocating these approaches can't even keep a simple WordPress blog up when faced with a bit of traffic. Surely there must be an algorithm for that?

There's no equivalent "online coding test" for admins, unfortunately.

Do you mean to tell me that the guy who created a bubble sort algorithm on a whiteboard during his interview can't set up and manage a WordPress blog that scales reasonably well, and that I need to hire a dedicated systems administrator?

Re: How to hire programmers using online coding test

#27

Post by nandemo »

ebbv wrote: post #6

The site has been crushed under the HN traffic (and wherever else this link is propagating today.) So I can only state my opinion on the title which is; this is a terrible basis on which to decide who to hire. I would never hire anyone without having an actual conversation with them. Whether I can get along with the person, if they will be a good fit for our team is the most important criteria. Test taking is not an…

Please consider refraining to comment on a story if you haven't read it. It just adds noise.

Case in point, the article does not recommend hiring without talking to the candidate.

Re: How to hire programmers using online coding test

#28

Post by gregors »

artmageddon wrote: post #20
7Figures2Commas wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Write program that prints prime numbers below 100. 2. ? 3. Profit! Interviews are a two-way street. If you're looking to hire an experienced developer and the best you can do is ask him to do something that he'll probably never have reason to do on the job, you're sending a pretty strong message about your company. If you're going to ask somebody to code (or solve a problem) as part of the interview process, there…

> Interviews are a two-way street. If you're looking to hire an experienced developer and the best you can do is ask him to do something that he'll probably never have reason to do on the job, you're sending a pretty strong message about your company. I know others will probably disagree, but I feel this way about brain-teaser questions. I remember one very specifically from a ex-Microsoft employee who interviewed me…

Brain teaser questions are great at finding candidates who have heard the brainteaser before. They are useless at finding people who are good at coding. Even Google accepts this now.

Re: How to hire programmers using online coding test

#29

Post by clueless123 »

I understand the frustration of sifting through hundreds of "fake" resumes where candidates can't code a fiz-buzz, but from the other end it is a total waste of my time spending 20 minutes of my time solving these coding challenges every time I want to know more about a prospective position.

If would be nice if the recruiter agencies (who are actually getting paid to do a job), would hire people qualified to understand if a candiadate is or not up to par for the job from a quick email or phone call.

Re: How to hire programmers using online coding test

#30

Post by Killswitch »

arikrak wrote: post #16
7Figures2Commas wrote: post #8

I always find it funny that half the people/companies advocating these approaches can't even keep a simple WordPress blog up when faced with a bit of traffic. Surely there must be an algorithm for that?

I hosted my WP blog for free on OpenShift and (with free Cloudflare) it was able to handle Reddit/HN traffic spikes without a problem. Not sure why everyone doesn't do something similar.

cache, cache, cache... Reddit and HN do not really send a lot of traffic... It baffles me to see peoples sites go down for 20k+ unique visitors total for the day... I've seen basic Wordpress installs with a few tweaks such as caching in place handle hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a day every day for months... It's not rocket science..
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