Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Please stop the coding challenges

blackentropy.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 493 posts

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#111

Post by ForHackernews »

dmvdoug wrote: post #100
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?

It’s like the bar exam for lawyers. It bears absolutely no relationship whatsoever to the actual job and the work you will be doing. It’s a pointless ritual. And the point of the above story is that the person performed the ritual and then promptly forgot all the words once they succeeded. It illustrates the pointlessness.

It's not a pointless ritual. It tests for determination, grit, and willingness to grind on difficult, frustrating and ultimately value-free tasks.

All crucial skills in the modern technology or legal workplace.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#112

Post by kstrauser »

cle wrote: post #40
itake wrote: post #15

> What companies often ignore is the extra time candidates invest beyond the “suggested time” for these tests. This is a feature not a bug. Companies are testing if you can focus and complete a hard uncomfortable challenging task, because at your job you’re expected to do things you don’t want to do, but will be rewarded for doing.

Requiring a huge time investment like that will filter out a lot of the non-desperate folks…probably exactly the folks they don’t want to filter out! Also do they really want to set the tone that “I expect you to intuit what I want and I won’t tell you directly”? Sounds like an awful place to work, right out of the gate.

That's a perfectly fair and reasonable tone to set because that's how approximately 99% of non-junior jobs work. My boss says he has a problem he'd like me to solve. He might not have all the details so it's on me to investigate the options, identify the gotchas, and clarify the ambiguities.

I never deliberately snuck ambiguities into coding challenges. I've used it in oral sessions for senior and above devs though. "I'm a product manager who wants to add a new feature. I don't really know what's involved but I want you to implement it. Feel free to ask me a million questions and we'll talk it through!"

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#113

Post by ForHackernews »

ryandrake wrote: post #101
marcellus23 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nominated for most HN comment of the week.

Come on! Everyone posting on HN makes $500K a year, has a vacation home in Tahoe and drives a brand new Ferrari. They think "L6 at Google in the Bay Area" is the median job level for the entire software industry.

If this article and the comments here are to be believed, all you need to do to make L6 is grind on leetcode.

Sounds like a good deal to me.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#114

Post by kstrauser »

exitb wrote: post #83
factotum wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why is that? Do you not agree that time is our most valuable asset?

Interviewing is a time investment for both sides. Should the company charge you to evaluate your skills?

Is that not literally LeetCode Premium?

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#115

Post by mekoka »

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.…

> IRL, this individual is a good but not exceptional engineer having worked with them on a small project.

Have you worked with them since they went through this regiment? Doing a DS&A coding problem regiment + system design will change you as an engineer. You might be surprised how good they've become.

Also they say they've forgotten. But if they were able to get that position, they probably could do medium level leetcode problems. So, I'd doubt they've forgotten all of it. I'm pretty sure they'd still be able to solve easy level problems, which most people can't solve off the cuff. They also probably still know the complexity of a bunch of essential backend operations (search, sort, array and hash lookups, tree & graph traversals, etc).

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#116

Post by ForHackernews »

kstrauser wrote: post #95
simonw wrote: post #3

> This is like asking a Ruby developer to debug PHP as a test of flexibility. Sounds like an OK test to me. Great (senior) developers should be able to do that kind of thing. Categorizing yourself exclusively as "a Ruby developer" is a career trap.

I once got hired after passing a JavaScript test, never having written a single line of it. The challenge was more conversational, like: Interviewer: Now reverse this array. Me: OK, in Python that would be array.reverse(), or reversed(array). I bet JS has one of those, probably the .reverse method. Interviewer: Great guess! That was genuinely fun. I came out of it feeling like I'd learned a few things, and the other…

I interviewed for a Scala role one time despite never having written it professionally. I suppose it's obscure enough that they couldn't afford to be too picky.

It was a pair programming exercise and so with some help from the interviewer and the IDE I was able to fumble through to a working result. I agree it was fun and educational.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#117

Post by 0xmarcin »

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…

Maybe there were in the past, currently there is entire industry there to help you game the system.

- Cracking the coding interview.

- Elements of programming interviews in Java|Python|whatever...

- leetcode & other sides with paid premium subscriptions...

- mock interview bootcamps...

It's no longer about skill, it's only about gaming the system.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#120

Post by dmvdoug »

ForHackernews wrote: post #111
dmvdoug wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s like the bar exam for lawyers. It bears absolutely no relationship whatsoever to the actual job and the work you will be doing. It’s a pointless ritual. And the point of the above story is that the person performed the ritual and then promptly forgot all the words once they succeeded. It illustrates the pointlessness.

It's not a pointless ritual. It tests for determination, grit, and willingness to grind on difficult, frustrating and ultimately value-free tasks. All crucial skills in the modern technology or legal workplace.

I was a lawyer. I passed the bar exam (first try, no less). I practiced. The bar exam does none of what you claimed for it. Now, I offered it here as an analogy, but I am not a software developer. It just sounded akin to what I do know from my own experience and from talking to literally hundreds of other lawyers, law school professors, judges and their clerks. So maybe it’s not a good analogy to software development. I don’t know.
Post reply on HN