Should I accept to have coding test after 6 years experience

Coding tests give the appearance of an objective interviewing process, but I haven’t seen evidence that such tests have predictive value. People who don’t perform well don’t get hired, so their possible contribution remains unknown. I have not seen companies track coding test skill and correlate it to job performance. Mostly these tests give the subjective and often irrelevant hiring process a veneer of rigor and objectivity.

In many, if not most, interviewing and hiring situations the candidate’s personality and presentation will have more effect than technical skills — we form impressions of people in a few seconds. Coding tests look like the main decider but human nature tends not to work so rationally.

The proliferation of books, web sites, classes, and bootcamps for technical interview prep demonstrate Goodhart’s Law: job seekers optimize for the interview rather than honing job skills and learning business domains. Interviewing well has obvious value for getting a job, but doesn’t necessarily predict adding value to the business.

Companies want people who can (at least appear to) immediately write code. Employers rarely invest in training or mentoring, there’s no apprenticeship path into programming for most of us anymore.

In 40 years programming I can’t recall ever having to invert a binary tree, or find a cycle in a linked list. Understanding basic data structures and algorithms has value, but companies don’t lose money or go under because of those kinds of things.

Sadly I find that trivial tests like FizzBuzz continue to work at weeding out a shocking number of people who simply can’t write working code. That says something about programmers at all experience levels: an inability to translate requirements into code. Employers should focus on identifying that ability, rather than mastery of technical arcana.

“Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid” — Han Solo, condemning Luke’s use of VI

Han Solo was killed by a hokey religion and an ancient weapon.

You are taking a coding test because the recruiter cannot evaluate you based on a conversation. Even if they were talented enough to be able to, they are not trusted enough by boss / client. The money they make is so good for recruiting a person, it drives a lot of people to push for people who cannot do the job, just for the commission.

A few years back I was looking for work without much luck. Finally I get a call from a head hunter that wanted to place me in a contract. It was short duration, only a month, but as much OT as I wanted. Pay was also very good. They wanted a DB guy. Although I am mostly coder, I do love DB and am more talented at DB than you typical coder. Digging deeper I found out they wanted someone to work at hardening (defense) the DB from intruders. Well that was well outside of my skill set. I refused to take the job as I knew the actual customer would not be happy, and I did not want a reputation for claiming to do stuff I was not capable of.

Thanks for your post I found it really helpful.