A recent related post with proposed solutions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41948474
Many of them are high-effort from the company doing the hiring, which is an optimisation factor people forget.
Please stop the coding challenges
241–250 of 493 posts
Re: Please stop the coding challenges
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I interviewed at Stripe, they had a "debug this!" question ready to go in a number of languages. (I think the list was something like: ruby, java, python, javascript, go, maybe one or two more.) I thought this was pretty great, but also seemed pretty labor intensive.
That is the way to do it, good on Stripe. Its definitely labor intensive, but I think that you either need to outsource it or be big enough that you can source the talent to build a half-dozen plus idiomatic and kind of big applications to make it a good test.
Yeah. In general I was impressed with Stripe's interview process. It was still the usual miserable day-long gauntlet, but with some thoughtful decisions mixed in, IMO. (This was 2022, FWIW.)
I'm pretty sure the thing they had me debug was a real bug they had hit in an open source dependency. It seemed like they had hit the bug, taken a snapshot of the code at that version, and written a test to exercise it. (And presumably then they fixed it, separately.) So it felt a lot like bugs I run into in the wild, but with some of the hard debugging work out of the way (getting it to the point of an easy repro in a unit test) in order to time-box it. I really thrived in this interview. It may be the only interview I've ever done where I felt like I was just using my actual skills like I would during the work day.
Re: Please stop the coding challenges
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you even do any of that for a senior role? I wouldn't waste my time with it, and it shows you don't know how to interview/evaluate for a senior position.
Because for a senior role you need to hire a person with senior role skills, I suppose. Just N years of experience at X company doesn't provide that. I'd rather look at someone's github repo than talk to their reference tbh.
I've never worked at a company with a public repo. I never understood this. I have a life outside of work
Re: Please stop the coding challenges
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
But is there a good way to find the "better possible hires" which doesn't have other significant disadvantages? If you have a convincing method of doing that, many companies would be interested in your ideas.
interview followed by paid internship/probation. watch them work on your real system. Keep them if they're good.
In the US this doesn't work well outside of college internships. Most tech workers don't want to shift to a new employer with a probation period. We already live under an "at will" employment relationship so employers can let you go anytime and workers can leave anytime. To have real value to a probation period for workers, we have to guarantee its harder to fire you past the probation period.
Re: Please stop the coding challenges
#245I recently ran an interview process for a relatively senior eng role at a tiny startup. Because I believe different interview methods work better for different people, I offered everyone a choice: 1. Do a takehome test, targeted to take about 4 hours but with no actual time limit. This was a non-algorithmic project that was just a stripped-down version of what I'd spent the last month on in actual work. 2. Do an onsi…
Interesting! I like the idea of choice, but as a hiring manager it makes my problem harder. How do you compare the results from different choices equitably? I find trying to compare candidates fairly to be quite difficult, even when they have the exact same interview. Last time I did a coding interview for real, I had the choice of any programming language, and could choose between 3 different problems to solve. I li…
in one interview for a python job i was allowed to submit solutions to tests in pike which i had more experience with, but none of the devs at the company had ever seen. for python they had an automated testsuite but i remember my interviewer telling me that the devs were pouring over my test results to verify them manually while we continued other parts of the interview. i got the job.
Re: Please stop the coding challenges
#246The part I always feel like is missing from the coding interview discussion is: "Are you testing the candidate on what the job will actually require, and ONLY that?" With an onsite whiteboarding challenge, you're most likely testing if they're really good at thinking and talking in front of a crowd when extremely nervous, not writing code. Same with a live coding challenge over zoom (CoderPad style) - this tends to b…
> Are you testing the candidate on what the job will actually require, and ONLY that?
As a hiring manager, I strive to evaluate for potential and adaptability, not a highly specific list of skills. I think many candidates prefer that, too, that they will be allowed and encouraged to learn how to do this job. I do not want to hire people that don’t want to learn or can’t do things they haven’t done before. And I may or may not even know exactly what the job will require. Do not assume your interviewer can tell you exactly what will happen once hired — they can’t! One thing I do know, for sure, is that the job will require communication with others, adaptability to changing requirements, and a willingness to learn the company’s workflow. I need to make sure those boxes are checked, sometimes more than I need to see how well someone knows jQuery or CUDA or sorting algorithms.
Re: Please stop the coding challenges
#247I recently ran an interview process for a relatively senior eng role at a tiny startup. Because I believe different interview methods work better for different people, I offered everyone a choice: 1. Do a takehome test, targeted to take about 4 hours but with no actual time limit. This was a non-algorithmic project that was just a stripped-down version of what I'd spent the last month on in actual work. 2. Do an onsi…
> ~90-95% of candidates chose the takehome test I was expecting "3. submit a code sample" to be the overwhelming winner here - did anybody choose that? Seems like a no-brainer, since it's already done...
The code I've written in personal projects have been pretty messy -- whereas code I've written professionally tend to be better (not perfect), but of course I can't share that code.
On the employer side, I would prefer the take home assignment over existing code, unless the existing code was super high quality or highly relevant to the company.
Re: Please stop the coding challenges
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me answer your unknowable question with another one: Which doctor would you prefer do surgery on your brain - the one that jumped through all the hoops and went to 15yrs of med school - or the one that learned brain surgery through a YouTube tutorial? I think you know the answer. The problem is not gatekeeping in general it’s the detail and nuance of how gates are being kept and how to find the right amount of ga…
We could theoretically have the best of both worlds, right? No unnecessary gatekeeping, but maximum necessary quality standards (which I distinguish from gatekeeping).
Theoretically? Maybe.
Practically? No one has figured out how. The best we have are coding challenges.
Re: Please stop the coding challenges
#249> When was the last time you had to debug an ancient codebase without documentation or help from a team? All the time. 300-400k SLOC in C++. Legacy in the sense that there were no tests of any kind. Little-to-no documentation. Solo developer at the tiny company. Fix bugs and add features while keeping the system available to the tens of thousands of users. A more recent example: here’s a patch for a critical feature…
> > When was the last time you had to debug an ancient codebase without documentation or help from a team?
> All the time.
So you were forced to do it in a silo? No access to any type of documentation, whatsoever? Not able to refer to any C++ manuals or any other type of documentation? Not permitted to access the internet to look things up? Barred from using online forums to seek help?
Re: Please stop the coding challenges
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you even do any of that for a senior role? I wouldn't waste my time with it, and it shows you don't know how to interview/evaluate for a senior position.
I've come around to the idea that all people who will be expected to write code as part of their job need to be evaluated for their ability to write code as part of the interview process. I've seen too many people write convincing and impressive resumes without a single ounce of technical ability to their name.
You're hiring for a senior role, not a junior or mid.
Your candidates aren't fresh out of school or just starting their careers. They already have plenty of work experience. They already know how to code and have been doing it for years. A conversation will tell you much more about their approaches to problems solving, team work, and mentoring than a coding challenge will. Looking at their GitHub, their work experience and references will tell you the rest.
It's like asking a doctor to go over basic human anatomy.