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Please stop the coding challenges

blackentropy.bearblog.dev

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Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#261

Post by thatguysaguy »

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…

Yeah from the title I thought this was going to be about leetcode problems, but this is truly something that comes up regularly.

Where are these dev jobs where _don't_ have to figure out some mysterious issue in a barely maintained GitHub repo semi-regularly?

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#262

Post by swatcoder »

mekoka wrote: post #234
swatcoder wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No home study grind on puzzle problems is a substitute for years of practical experience, which is what most teams actually hope for in their higher-level engineers. The point is not that the friend didn't pick up some implicit knowledge or become a sharper engineer than they were before grinding, it's that by exploiting the screening strategy, they got placed into a job they're not truly qualified for. Are they brig…

> No home study grind on puzzle problems is a substitute for years of practical experience, which is what most teams actually hope for in their higher-level engineers. Perhaps. I had 9 years of practical experience myself before going through that grind (leetcode + system design) some years ago. It is no substitute, but you don't come out of it the same engineer. You read, write and understand code differently. Also,…

In this example, we're talking about an L6/staff role.

If the role is correctly staffed, nobody should have to be looking over that person's shoulder questioning data structure choices and algorithm efficiency regardless of what the person's background is.

It's absolutely the case that there are people with 9 years of experience who are not prepared to meet the needs of that role. There are people with 19 and 29 and 49 years of experience that fit into that bucket. Practice alone doesn't get you there.

But as you note, as a rule, you expect your bright, leetcode-grinding "newbie" to need mentoring and oversight to compensate for their propensity to rely on shallow theory where they don't know better from experience. That's not someone a team wants in a L6/staff role either!

For high level roles, you need bright, curious people who are experienced but not rigid. Admittedly, there's only so many of them, but when you start having to fill those roles with people that don't meet each of those criteria, you can't be surprised when the team's morale and output suffer. Which is exactly what we see as an outcome of the recent boom (and each prior one), because you end up having the blind lead the blind through the minefield of engineering.. and that's going to be messy no matter how clever or book-studied those folk happen to be.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#263

Post by bhhaskin »

stickfigure wrote: post #225
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.

What would you waste your time with? I exclusively give pairing interviews, usually just 1 hr. The variance between good and bad candidates is amazing, and you wouldn't guess at all from resumes or casual conversations. Most candidates have given me very positive feedback. Why wouldn't you want to be interviewed like this?

I'm a senior developer. Of course I know how to code. Do you know how many code challenges I've done over the course of my career? 99% of them where terrible at evaluating my ability to code. They are a waste of time at the senior level. You are much better off with a conversation, looking at past work and experience and references than you are doing code challenges.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#264

Post by abramN »

we administer a coding challenge designed to ensure people can do some basic coding - we don't even have them compile it. But we have caught people who start talking about using a B tree to solve fizzbuzz and we know they're not a fit. It's useful as an initial screener.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#265

Post by boogieknite »

Had the weirdest interview of my life on Tuesday, more on that at the end.

Relevant part: the interviewer/CEO's philosophy is not to code challenge because no one properly vetted for "problem-solving, collaboration, and growth in relevant areas" (tfa) would ever accept a job they were going to fail at. Will always stick with me.

Now, here's the weirdest interview of my life: An acquaintance who runs a software business interviewed me by bringing me along to an NBA game he has season tickets for. The interview in the dining area before the game was normal, the game included some breaks for more interview discussion, but the home team had the best shooting night of their entire season so the crowd was very rowdy and we each had 2 beers.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#266

Post by gsbcbdjfncnjd »

mekoka wrote: post #234
swatcoder wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No home study grind on puzzle problems is a substitute for years of practical experience, which is what most teams actually hope for in their higher-level engineers. The point is not that the friend didn't pick up some implicit knowledge or become a sharper engineer than they were before grinding, it's that by exploiting the screening strategy, they got placed into a job they're not truly qualified for. Are they brig…

> No home study grind on puzzle problems is a substitute for years of practical experience, which is what most teams actually hope for in their higher-level engineers. Perhaps. I had 9 years of practical experience myself before going through that grind (leetcode + system design) some years ago. It is no substitute, but you don't come out of it the same engineer. You read, write and understand code differently. Also,…

That’s a false dichotomy. I’ve never felt the need to do the DS&A grind for one of these roles and I would never dream of writing the ungodly inefficient code you just imputed to my peer group.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#267

Post by coding123 »

I had one coding challenge a month ago that said: this should take you no longer than 2 hours. It didn't have guard rails on it so you could technically spend more time on it. It ended up taking me 2 days on and off because it was basically build a front and and a backend. And then later I realized the instructions for submission were totally broken too: DONT make a PR - later in the instructions: make a PR.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#268

Post by momojo »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #180
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.…

Back when I had a job hiring people we created problems we could walk people through and see what they figured out on the fly/what they knew but didn't know they knew. That was what I was taught whiteboard problems were, not this lame leet code. But I grew up with both parents in 1980s/90s Santa Cruz tech. The current scene adopted the practice but made it exclusive when it was intended to be inclusive (because there…

I'm from the Bay but I've never heard "Santa Cruz Tech" before. Its always been a sleepy beach/uni town to me. Have any interesting anecdotes?

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#269

Post by bhhaskin »

alkonaut wrote: post #251
John_Cena wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wouldn't that be a red flag if they don't have any public code at all as a senior developer? They aren't fresh out of school or just starting their careers. They should have something.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#270

Post by RussianCow »

mekoka wrote: post #234
swatcoder wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No home study grind on puzzle problems is a substitute for years of practical experience, which is what most teams actually hope for in their higher-level engineers. The point is not that the friend didn't pick up some implicit knowledge or become a sharper engineer than they were before grinding, it's that by exploiting the screening strategy, they got placed into a job they're not truly qualified for. Are they brig…

> No home study grind on puzzle problems is a substitute for years of practical experience, which is what most teams actually hope for in their higher-level engineers. Perhaps. I had 9 years of practical experience myself before going through that grind (leetcode + system design) some years ago. It is no substitute, but you don't come out of it the same engineer. You read, write and understand code differently. Also,…

> Exponential inner loops for big searches, huge recursive calls. Those things show up in code written by experienced coders IRL.

The thing is, those things are easily fixable after the fact. A bad architecture is not, and without practical experience designing systems in the real world, you don't have those instincts to guide you towards the correct choices because you haven't made any mistakes to learn from.

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