I'm applying for a new job in the EU and all the recruiters asked me to do a coding test before even small companies.
some of the tests were super stupid and many recruiters were unprofessional during the test ( some of them didn't accept to write a pseudocode for my solution on a whiteboard he asked to write python code)
wondering if I should train more on interview questions or should I push to keep it a high-level discussion about my previous projects.
Should I accept to have coding test after 6 years experience
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Re: Should I accept to have coding test after 6 years experience
#2I had to do a coding take home test after 15+ years of experience.
The market is what the market is. You could turn down any interviews that require you to take a coding test and see what is out there.
Re: Should I accept to have coding test after 6 years experience
#3I code screen everyone on a laptop using their favorite tools - I want to see how they work, how they debug, how they solve problems.
Some engineers can talk a good game and can't really code at all, or they're cut-and-paste programmers who can only solve a problem by finding 80% of it on Stack Overflow...
Re: Should I accept to have coding test after 6 years experience
#4I have interviewed many people for programming positions. Some could write apparently reasonable pseudocode, but never actually convert it into working code, even in the language of their choice. A worryingly large number couldn't write the simplest routine to perform trivial tasks, even in the language of their choice.
Some of the above claimed to have 10 years experience in the field.
There's a lot of push-back against requiring FizzBuzz, and I understand that. So the approach I took was to say - "Let's start with a simple FizzBuzz routine and we'll discuss some issues that arise from it."
But you get complete jerks in recruiting, just as you actually get complete jerks everywhere. If you don't like the atmosphere the recruiters/interviewers are creating, would you want to work there? You need to assess how representative these people are of the company as a whole.
In the end, it's up to you. Sometimes to accomplish something you simply have to schlep[0], put up with the tedious and annoying for the sake of accomplishing your goals.
Re: Should I accept to have coding test after 6 years experience
#5Seeing how someone drives an editor, IDE or cli is often a strong indicator of how good they are... Watching people arrow around in vim often gives me all the information I need when interviewing...
Re: Should I accept to have coding test after 6 years experience
#6Seeing how someone drives an editor, IDE or cli is often a strong indicator of how good they are... Watching people arrow around in vim often gives me all the information I need when interviewing...
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Re: Should I accept to have coding test after 6 years experience
#7I appreciate that going through hiring process is challenging, and it is stressful and time consuming to need to prove or demonstrate yourself again and again in a process that can be rather artificial and seem unrelated to the job, often while getting negative feedback.
On another hand, think about it from a company perspective: maybe 100 people apply for an advertised role. 25 might be excluded based on CV. Remaining 75 are phone screened and given coding tests online. 35 might be excluded based on that. 40 invited to proceed to on site to interview. 5 out of 40 candidates might demonstrate reasonable ability during on site interviews in terms of actually being able to write code, and demonstrate some problem solving ability, and some familiarity with common data structures, and not have obvious red flags about how they relate to people. Two of these 5 candidates who gave a strong performance drop out due to competing offers, one runs into visa issues, remaining two offers are made and accepted.
Some candidates will apply for roles with no relevant experience, some candidates will demonstrate no ability to program in their preferred programming language during on site interviews after doing well during an earlier remote coding test (e.g. they got a friend to sit the test for them), some candidates have 10 years commercial experience but cannot assess when to use an array versus a hash map.
This might boil down to something like 150 - 200 hours of human effort, much of this engineering effort required to assess engineering ability, to identify a single candidate who is a strong fit and goes on to accept an offer.
From the company's perspective, the company has an imperfect hiring process. Sometimes candidates have a rough day, freeze under stress and don't perform well during the interview- even if they could be a good fit for the job. Sometimes the hiring process emphasises measuring things that aren't necessarily the most important things for the role. But it costs the company a lot more money to hire the wrong person versus missing hiring a person who's a great fit, so it's probably the right tradeoff to bias the hiring process to reject more often than accept, and risk rejecting a number of candidates who could have turned out great.
Re: Should I accept to have coding test after 6 years experience
#8Majority of coding tests are extremely unrealistic anyways and you never use any of it in real world. Let's say some fizzbuzz or fibonacci or whatever else. I've only had 2 realistic interviews where they ask you to code some microservice or create some app and present it to them. They also make the excuse "I want to see how you think" but let's be honest in real world you would Google and try out bunch of things until something works for lets say some CRUD app you are building and you barely ever use any "logic" to build something, so don't stress about it.
Re: Should I accept to have coding test after 6 years experience
#9No, writing throwaway code is a waste of time.
Re: Should I accept to have coding test after 6 years experience
#10Seeing how someone drives an editor, IDE or cli is often a strong indicator of how good they are... Watching people arrow around in vim often gives me all the information I need when interviewing...
Yeah how dare people use the keys specifically design to move around a text editor! Just use hjkl like they did on some machine decades ago because it had a limited keyboard.