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Some companies have a more straight forward interview process. Try to stay away from big companies. There are startups paying very well.
Not quite. Learn more about Monad and Category theory then i'm sure you're really a good programmer.
But category theory?
> I understands the usage of Hash / Map instead of searching arrays and many other small things that actually enhance the code performance I would consider this an assumed skill for any developer with a college degree. It’s basically the point of the entire Data Structures class, which is a degree requirement.
I'd take people that have initiative, want to learn and are coach-able over someone that can excel at taking tests.
World needs more 1x programmers.
OP seems more of a 10x dude IMHO
Now I went through with them some extra things in the interview and fixed some things about the code and handled some things a bit better. After this investment of time I was told I didn’t handle errors well enough in this 100% coverage tested example code of a library. This in my opinion was not true or even discussed in the interview, error handling was certainly not specifically mentioned in the assignment.
Anyway to address your point, I don’t think you should necessarily believe what other people say about you in job interviews; there are various types of interviewer but mostly the feedback is post rationalisation of “that’s not how I would have done it” even if your solution solves the problem perfectly. For this reason I’ve decided unless I can’t afford to feed myself I will avoid doing at home coding exercises that are deliberately vague in the future.
If you want to get better at in person/under pressure coding exercises I highly recommend taking on Advent of Code [1] one year, these are the opposite of the vague problem specified above as there is an exact and clear right answer to collect each star.
> I understands the usage of Hash / Map instead of searching arrays and many other small things that actually enhance the code performance I would consider this an assumed skill for any developer with a college degree. It’s basically the point of the entire Data Structures class, which is a degree requirement.
Me: “why don’t you just use a hash table here? That array you’re iterating through each time has like 200,000 entries”
Him: “I can’t. I need to be able to get both the key and the value and hash tables don’t store the key”
Me: “…sigh, school has failed us again”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is so weird. Aren’t you just selecting for obedience and unnecessary hoop jumping? It seems like this would also select the kind of engineers who aren’t willing to say “no, that’s a dumb approach, we shouldn’t do that, here’s an alternative”? When I was a Junior dev one of the first lessons my boss taught me was to always always speak up if something looked off to me. Maybe I’d get an explanation and be enlighte…
> It seems like this would also select the kind of engineers who aren’t willing to say “no, that’s a dumb approach, we shouldn’t do that, here’s an alternative”? This is exactly the reason why any big enough company is eventually going to s*hit And why founding team doesn’t stay long in a successful startup.
Doesn't the founding team get to determine the hiring practices?
Doing well at interviews has low correlation with being good at the job, simple as that.
That's true, but only because companies are bad at interviewing. It is possible to do much better than companies typically do at this. It's just a really hard skill to master, and involves more than just standardised testing.