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

251–260 of 493 posts

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#251

Post by alkonaut »

John_Cena wrote: post #243
alkonaut wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Neither did I. But I'd rather just "smuggle" out some past work and "rewrite it" to make it inconspicuous, if I didn't have my own personal work to show. The company I work for isn't well known so saying "I worked there in a senior role for 10 years" isn't going to get me the next job. If I didn't have anything to show for that I either made for fun or could display from a past job, I'd not apply for another until I had tbh.

People say "No I don't have any past hobby work, never contributed to OSS, and all my professional work is verboten to show" that's not unusual, but it's also not an encouraging sign to me when interviewing.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#252

Post by cess11 »

HPsquared wrote: post #185
cess11 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently they expect people to work for free for more than a month to learn material they then won't use. In my mind that's a rather nasty practice. Not that I'm complaining. I'm happy to pick up people that are good at computers but wouldn't be able to pass that hurdle, and probably wouldn't hire anyone that has.

It's very mild compared to postgraduate education. Or getting a degree in general. That's years!

Sure. Why is it a worthwhile comparison?

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#253

Post by John_Cena »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #74

> When was the last time you had to debug an ancient codebase without documentation or help from a team? Literally every day this week. Documentation? The code was last updated in June, the documentation was last updated in January - of 2022. The team? The half that didn't get laid off two years ago all quit for greener pastures. Sure, there's a team that owns this project - along with three others, all of which they…

I have no issue with doing this on a job, but i have issue with it in interviews. Not everyone is able to be comfortable in a strange environment with strange people. Give me a damn take-home test and stop talking amongst yourselves while i'm at the whiteboard.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#254

Post by luismedel »

pmg101 wrote: post #89
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?

A moderately smart person was selected for a good job perhaps over many many better possible hires simply because that person had the leisure to learn the game. Inefficient. But nice for that individual, naturally.

I don't like the "state of the art" of tech hiring but I think this thing you say can be said to any of us in our jobs and that's not fair.

We all part from the same place (understand me: from the standpoint of the hirer, I know we have different vital stories). They open the position to all of us and want to be impressed. The one that makes it, gets the job.

It is the best way? Absolutely not. Is it unfair? No.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#255

Post by crazygringo »

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.…

If you talk to hiring at some of these companies, it is intentionally designed to be this way so that it is fairly meritocratic.

In other words, anybody, regardless of what university they went to or what courses they took out what advantages or disadvantages they had, can learn this stuff in a couple of months if they have what it takes for the role. And because the skills are so standardized, the process is pretty differently objective.

It's not expected that they'll actually use the specific skills in the job. But it shows they can learn skills of that type and then perform them at a high level in a stressful interview situation. Which is a great signal for whether they can learn the skills needed for the specific project they wind up on and perform in a high stakes deadline scenario.

I'm not defending the system, but I am saying there's a clear logic behind it.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#256

Post by morkalork »

zimpenfish wrote: post #200
agentultra wrote: post #154

> 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…

+1 for "all the time". Today I have been debugging a critical piece of the system which is written in Python (none of the rest of the system is) and largely hasn't been updated since 2020 and, you'll not be surprised, has no comments, no documentation, and a fucked up deployment system which makes me cry every time I have to think about it. Last week I was debugging some similarly uncommented, undocumented, Go code f…

+1 here too. The situation always comes up after some kind of fucked up acquisition. Nothing like inheriting an entire code base built on someone else's stack when all the original developers decided to quit or were laid off. Ancient versions of Python and Java, deployment done by pull and pray. Multiple versions of the same service in different places because they were half way through some modernization when it all came to an end. Fun stuff. Getting your bearings fast is a real skill.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#257

Post by bhhaskin »

dahart wrote: post #218
bhhaskin wrote: post #209

Earlier 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.

Why wouldn’t you? How should one evaluate a senior position, in your opinion? Are you suggesting a senior dev shouldn’t need to demonstrate any coding skill? (If not, why not?) Or are you suggesting that there are other faster ways to show coding skills?

I responded to a different comment but it's also relevant here.

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.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#258

Post by __loam »

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #66
makk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Categorizing yourself exclusively as "a Ruby developer" is a career trap. And a lucrative one at that.

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…

Ruby is so god awful yet so many successful companies use it as the bedrock language there's always going to be jobs maintaining the piles of crap it leads to.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#259

Post by norir »

I feel like the real problem is that most people are poor evaluators of talent. The pervasive bad interview processes in industry reflect this truth (as well as cowardice that allows people to hide behind process to avoid accountability as well as accusations of bias). The only way to escape this trap is to find the right connections or start your own org. Otherwise you will spend your entire career suffering the consequences of broken interview processes (both in terms of your experience getting hired as well as being forced to work with bad hires who game the system).

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#260

Post by ben_w »

KronisLV wrote: post #228
agentultra wrote: post #154

> 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…

> Solo developer at the tiny company. > Fix bugs and add features while keeping the system available to the tens of thousands of users. Don't tens of thousands of users warrant more developers? Or having enough of a budget to work on tests, or other things to improve the developer experience and be able to work without lots of stress? That's unfortunate.

I think I managed about 10k users with my mac shareware games in 2009/10, and that didn't get me ramen profitability let alone modern pay scales.

So not necessarily any budget for more than they did.

Post reply on HN