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Please stop the coding challenges

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Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#271

Post by dahart »

bhhaskin wrote: post #257
dahart wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cod…

You’re underestimating the variance in senior devs, and you’re failing to look at this from the interviewer’s perspective. Sometimes doctors should be quizzed on anatomy, btw.

They need to be able to compare candidates, and senior devs will be expected to code. Their goal is to pick the best candidate. Asking them to demonstrate their coding skill isn’t just fair game, it’s what half the interviewees actually want. A lot of people prefer being evaluated on code than on soft skills (just read the threads here for tons of evidence.)

It’s useful to know whether a candidate is going to be on the principal engineer path or management path. It’s useful to know whether they are actually good at coding, and how good exactly. And it’s also useful to know if they are willing to do what needs to be done once hired. Someone interviewing for a senior coding position who refuses to code during the interview is about as big of a red flag as you can have, and I’ve been part of hiring teams that will politely excuse someone for that, and I agree with the reasoning.

This might not make sense until you’re on the hiring side of things, but having a resume does not entitle one to being hired for a higher title and more money.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#272

Post by sfink »

dahart wrote: post #231
fishtoaster wrote: post #195

I 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…

> as a hiring manager it makes my problem harder. How do you compare the results from different choices equitably?

That makes sense, and it's the perspective that's being drilled into a lot of us. Implicit bias and all that. But in my experience, the comparison problem has never been that big of an issue in practice. I guess it depends on the hiring climate, but I'm much more familiar with spending a lot of time going through mediocre candidates and looking for someone who's "good enough". And this is when the recruiter is doing their job, and I understand why each candidate made it to the interview stage. Sure, sometimes it's a hot position (or rather, hot group to work for) and we get multiple good candidates, but then the decisionmaking process is more about "do we want A, who has deep and solid experience in this exact area; or B, who blew us away with their breadth of knowledge, flexibility, and creativity?" than something like "do we want A who did great on the take-home test but was unimpressive in person, or B whose solution to the take-home test was so-so but was clearly very knowledgeable and experienced in person?" The latter is in a hypothetical case where everyone did the same stuff, just to make it easier to compare, but even in that setup that's an uncommon and uninteresting choice. You're comparing test results and trying to infer Truth from it. Test results don't give a lot of signal or predictive power in the first place, so if you're trying to be objective by relying only on normalized scores, then you're not working with much of value.

Take home tests or whiteboard tests or whatever are ok to use as a filter, but people aren't points along a one-dimensional "quality" line. Use whatever you have to in order to find people that have a decent probability of being good enough, then stop thinking about how they might fail and start thinking about what it would look like if they succeed. They'll have different strengths and advantages. Standardizing your tests isn't going to help you explore those.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#274

Post by John_Cena »

hodgesrm wrote: post #213
frithsun wrote: post #207

They're just encrypted IQ tests, working around the Duke Power supreme court ban on IQ testing employees. You're being tested on your general intelligence, not because anybody cares about binary trees or reversing linked lists or whatever.

> You're being tested on your general intelligence, not because anybody cares about binary trees or reversing linked lists or whatever. A lot of interviewers missed that memo. They are in fact very focused on a specific algorithm or design approach. It's quite tiresome.

I've never been so deflated than after leaving a interview after bombing it and seeing the question they asked me on the front page of leetcode.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#275

Post by 6510 »

wlesieutre wrote: post #215
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…

> When was the last time you had to debug an ancient codebase without documentation or help from a team? Heck, I have to debug the stuff that some idiot (me) wrote six months ago and it might as well have been someone else who wrote it for all I remember about how to debug it

haha, then find code that loves performance and hates the reader.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#276

Post by margorczynski »

_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…

Well it shows that you are ready to invest a lot of your own free time into being recruited there - i.e. you'll be a loyal and hard worker. And that you're smart enough to learn it all. So I would say it has a character + IQ component to it.

Of course 95%+ of it will usually be useless in your real-life work, to solve most of those problems in the time given you need to know the problem and the optimal solution to it so basically memorization with little thinking.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#277

Post by em-bee »

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…

that's what i am trying to explain in every job application. but almost every job description expects multiple years of experience with a very specific tech stack. so far being a generalist with senior level experience did not yield a single positive response, let alone an offer.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#278

Post by evoke4908 »

thatguysaguy wrote: post #261
zimpenfish wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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?

Yeah, I feel like jobs that don't require you to reverse engineer a bunch of stuff are the exception, not the inverse.

Hall, I do greenfield embedded programming. Most of the code I touch is completely new; the entire codebase has been replaced and rewritten by me over the last three years. Not one other developer has contributed any significant amount of code. Even then, in this scenario, I'm still reverse engineering some arcane undocumented code at least once a week. Nobody ever documents their libraries properly so I have to rip everything apart to see how it works. Or I need to adapt some vendor example code or a GitHub repo into a slightly different form. Even just existing in the ESP-IDF environment I have to dig into the core code to figure out what the hell it's doing and where these error messages come from.

If you can't read someone else's Gordian knot of undocumented code, I'd argue you are probably not very good at writing code. Reading bad code is a vital part of learning to write good code, and is generally just a fundamental core skill that every programmer needs to have.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#279

Post by duped »

Jtsummers wrote: post #221
duped wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't match my experience on both ends of the hiring table. And forgive me if forwarding the BLS statistics to candidates doesn't get them to accept offers, because I know it wouldn't help me when I can get paid a lot more elsewhere.

> That doesn't match my experience on both ends of the hiring table. Congratulations, your experience is limited. The BLS stats represent the actual US salary data, not just your limited experience. If you want to make a claim about salaries in the US then look at data across the US and not just whatever is true within your limited bubble. > And forgive me if forwarding the BLS statistics to candidates doesn't get th…

I take the BLS numbers with a huge grain of salt, they are useful for identifying trends and not absolute facts on the ground.

> Did I ever even suggest such a thing?

My point is that the BLS doesn't set market rates or report on them.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#280

Post by [deleted] »

commandlinefan wrote: post #239
fishtoaster wrote: post #195

I 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...

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