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Please stop the coding challenges

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Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#121

Post by ryandrake »

parpfish wrote: post #68

one of the biggest problems with coding challenges for me is the conflict between providing a good solution versus making a strong impression. do you show them a quick'n'dirty solution that ignores edge cases but shows i'm a pragmatic and not going to overcomplicate things? OR do you show something fancy that you'd never actually do in an real codebase that shows off my depth of knowledge and where my ceiling is?

Unfortunately, you often have to ask the interviewer (which is tough when it's a coding challenge and you have no way to ask for clarification on the rules). I know interviewers who will say "You didn't cover edge case A, B, and C, your solution is incomplete!" and other interviewers who will say "You are overthinking this, I'm just looking for an MVP."

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#122

Post by alexawarrior4 »

Xelynega wrote: post #54
bluedevilzn wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s lucrative if your bar is 6 figures. No engineer that makes 7 figures calls themselves a ruby developer with the exception of DHH.

Isn't the average for software developers in the US ~100k(before taxes)? Assuming that high earners are offsetting that to the higher end, most people aren't making 6 figures, and the bar isn't which language they're programming in.

One of the few areas of reliable statistics about US software developer pay come from the US Government Bureau of Labor Statistics. The median wage as of May 2023:

$132,270

This means half of all full time employed devs are higher, and half are lower. The mean is more skewed by higher earners but is similar:

$138,110

It also varies quite widely by geographic location, from a mean high of $173,780 in California to only $125,890 in Texas, from $199,800 in San Jose to $132,500 in Austin to $98,960 in rural Kansas (where I have actually developed software before!)

The short of it is, the vast majority of software developers do not make the top salaries. Even L6 is rare within the top tier of tech. There is a lot of delusion in this field around pay, so it's important to be well informed. As a field we are still very well paid compared to most other jobs especially considering our safe working conditions and lack of needed credentials and education. Compared to most of the work on this planet, it's still a goldmine.

Source: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#123

Post by fatbird »

My employer's coding challenge uses replit and takes 30 minutes in which we're watching them do it (and interacting, asking them questions or prompting them with hints). It's not a hard challenge at all--one candidate who'd been grinding leetcode did it twice in the 30 minutes, with different solutions. We do the same with a system design question.

Most finish it, some don't and still get hired. It's a workalong in which we see how they approach the problem, how they discuss it with me, and what they do if they get stuck. We tell them to go ahead and google things, just tell us what they're looking for.

Over 10 years, we've got a pretty good record of hires that are smart, professional, and effective. And without specifically trying to hire for diversity, we've had a surprisingly diverse range of hires. We don't care about "culture fit", it's more like "work fit".

So I agree that the sort of code challenge where you send them away and see what they come up with is both unfair and a poor indicator. The real hiring test in an interview should be "can I work alongside this person?"

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#124

Post by margalabargala »

bluedevilzn wrote: post #109
sundaeofshock wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many developers are out there making $1,000,000/year? Not in the hopes of hitting it big someday off of equity, but actual annual payoff? How many companies are out there paying $1,000,000/year for devs? How many devs who can command that kind salary are going to put up with bullshit coding challenges?

Many thousands of Sr. Staff engineers+ and Sr. managers+ across FAANG. Google alone has 4000 directors all making a million at minimum. I have only worked at FAANG across my nearly decade long career. So, it’s a biased but very large sample.

Okay, and let's say there's another 4000 Sr Staff+ engineers at Google making that much. That's 4% of the company.

That's not unheard of, but it's certainly rare. $1 million+ is not a "typical salary", even at Google.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#125

Post by alexawarrior4 »

bluedevilzn wrote: post #109
sundaeofshock wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many developers are out there making $1,000,000/year? Not in the hopes of hitting it big someday off of equity, but actual annual payoff? How many companies are out there paying $1,000,000/year for devs? How many devs who can command that kind salary are going to put up with bullshit coding challenges?

Many thousands of Sr. Staff engineers+ and Sr. managers+ across FAANG. Google alone has 4000 directors all making a million at minimum. I have only worked at FAANG across my nearly decade long career. So, it’s a biased but very large sample.

If you sample only from the 10,000 or so current Olympic athletes, you will draw similarly incorrect conclusions about the 8 billion planetary general population's athletic ability.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#126

Post by evnix »

As someone who interviews i support these tests, my reasoning is very different

1. Applicants getting hired because the manager and the candidate is from the same institute or they like the same team or band.

2. Bias based on age or race. I try to remove my own sub conscious bias as best as I can but most don't.

3. HR thinking you are not good enough and rejecting because you did java 18 and not java 19. Or you can write impressive React but haven't done Vue.

It takes the managers and HR a little out of the equation. They just rubber stamp your decision.

Take home exercises are something we tried but the incidents of cheating were so high and good code is so subjective that we gave up.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#127

Post by ryandrake »

mrweasel wrote: post #88
tga wrote: post #12

So we should stop the coding challenges, stop LeetCode, stop whiteboarding, stop profiling candidates, stop asking for their GitHub page. How is hiring supposed to work then? Just post the contract online and the first one to mail it back gets the job? I like live coding challenges, something like a ~2 hour pair programming session, ideally modifying an existing project. I invest as much time as each candidate, while…

You could also, you know, talk to people, like we did before Google and the Silicon Valley bro-wanna-bes decided that coding interviews was the only solution. I've hired plenty of people without having coding challenges or any form of live coding. I've been happy with all of those hires. A former co-worker did some take-home coding tasks, which they'd then talk to the candidate about during the interview. I feel like…

I admit I've been hired once from just a friendly chit-chat, but I can't see how this could be reliable. There are so many bullshitters in the industry, who, during character creation put all their skill points into Charisma. They are smooth talking, good looking, and have all those charming Ivy League mannerisms of an Investment Banker or Enterprise Sales person. And while they might not be able to be technically deep enough to fool an engineer interviewer, they will absolutely fool the director or VP who does the final screen and has the final say. These kinds of people flock to companies who don't do robust technical screens.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#128

Post by keiferski »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #93
keiferski wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the interview is testing for the ability to learn new difficult things quickly, then it would seem to be successful.

Is "cramming" the same as "learning"? Is knowing the chemical reaction between an acid and baking soda the same as being a world class patissier? Many of these exercises are like "demonstrate that you can make this dough rise" but not actually considering "can you make an artful and delicious pastry"; the two are totally different. The most surprising thing when asked about their experience was that most of the detai…

Depends on the situation and job of course, but cramming isn't necessarily always a negative thing. Sometimes you may only need to learn a technology/skill/etc. to accomplish something quickly, but then not need it again.

But yeah in general I agree with you – I just don't think it's necessarily always so clearly a waste of time.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#129

Post by bboygravity »

ryandrake wrote: post #97
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the short term. And then the entire industry experiences some kind of a technological shift, as it will for many more cycles, and you're jobless as early as the first wave. It's ridiculous how developers mindlessly accept that you should constantly be learning to keep yourself relevant, but keep it shallow by just jumping from one tool to another, instead of encouraging deeper knowledge of generalizable patterns t…

Exactly. I managed to ride a nice maybe 8 year wave as an "OpenGL expert" but the industry moved on and I didn't go more general with 3D graphics to climb out of my niche. I haven't been in that industry since the OpenGL waterline crested and went back out to sea. Learned that lesson. Be a generalist. Yes, deep specialists exist and yes, some of them have successful careers based on their deep specialty, but betting…

Embedded C and C++ should be good for at least another 20 years or so (except AI will take over by then).

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#130

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

bluedevilzn wrote: post #107
qwertygnu wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no need to be shooting for 7 figures. Get a life

Working 40 hours and making 7 figures, gives you plenty of time to have a life. The key here is not to categorize as a “language developer”.

Is 7 figures even realistic? I was under the impression that even a senior FAANG job was still just under $300k typically. Does anyone outside of a CTO/CIO make $1mil+?
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