On asking job candidates to code

As I mentioned in another comment on this thread, one of the biggest issues is framing programming as a low-status, commodity activity.

I doubt Digital Ocean does this since they want good people, but a lot of firms absolutely design their hiring process to create an upper hand and lower your status before you even walk in the door -- especially if you're an experienced engineer.

Short timed tests or whiteboard hazing are the worst version of this. These are the most blatant attempts to commoditize software labor down into a fixed set of "primitives" like data structure trivia or riddles. This is what organizations like HackerRank exist to do: allow big companies to suppress wages by creating these sorts of commodization filters. They don't attempt to capture the value of creative problem solving at all -- because the company is not pricing the value of creative problem solving into the budget for the position, since it's a rank-and-file commodity job.

For this reason alone, you are better off flat out rejecting anything like a HackerRank test or similar online, interactive, short timed test. I would absolutely go so far as to even refuse to write code on a whiteboard if asked to do so in an in-person interview. It's fine to talk about how to solve a problem and spec things out. But the minute it becomes focused on actual fucking syntax, it's game over. You are now a cog.

Longer-form tests are a lot harder to evaluate from the candidate's point of view. Now you are asking for a significant chunk of my time, without paying me. And I am still at the mercy of whatever you happen to think constitutes a valid test. I might look at your take home test and thing, "wtf? this has nothing to do with real world work." Where does that leave me? Of course I want to impress the hiring staff, but I also don't want to get roped into a bad job, and a team that hires me to do real world work by using contrived coding examples is probably not a good place to be.

Personally, I think it's a lot more useful to talk about code that already exists. Either example code form the candidate, or example code that you give to them along with some time to study it.

Engineers read code more than they write code anyway, and right when you hire someone, even if you're a bleeding edge start-up, their short-term impact is a lot more predicated on their ability to read code and quickly learn a new system, not so much writing a bunch of stuff from scratch.

It's also pretty hard to fake competency when reading and discussing actual code. If you don't know how something works, you just don't know. You probably can't just google how the internals of some highly-specific ad hoc code works, unlike data structure trivia (which is yet another reason why it just doesn't matter how much data structure trivia you have memorized).

Basically, my overall conclusion is that when someone asks you to code in a short, timed setting, they are basically lighting a cigar, fingering their handlebar moustache, kicking their feet up on the table, and saying "dance monkey dance."

Unless you are literally desperate for the job, you should reject it right away. You are being positioned so that no matter how well you do on the test, you are but a lowly code typist and they will not take your attempts at negotiation seriously.

> This process has made me consider changing careers because it's so exhausting.

Me too. I'm so put off by the entire process but it seems that to stay relevant, you have to get lucky and end up at a place that keeps your skills up-to-date with opportunities to learn and use the latest tech, or you jump ship every 2-3 years meaning you're once again dealing with this insane pressure of interviewing. Throw in ageism once you get past your mid-30s or so and the mere thought of staying in the industry starts to look quite depressing :-/

Only worthless? You've been lucky. I have learned from my experience that HR is at best an enormous obstruction that must be continually worked around, and is at worst an enemy to whom you should never show your back.

Or your belly, for that matter.

Maybe this is a bit rant-y, but "Paid Fairly" is incredibly relative. Every time I've been asked about doing some sort of paid coding assignment in my free time, I've asked to be paid at my hourly consulting rate, which many people do regularly, which is $60/hr. This is really not that much for a consulting developer.

Every time this has come up, the company would not pay that rate, and offered something more like $20/hr.

It is just insane to me that if you are interviewing me for a position which makes $105,000 a year and cannot offer even close to equivalent compensation for the interview.

HN is not a place for discussing personal details about somebody, like how they look. Moreover, that weird "but" makes this comment read like an attack. Please don't post anything like this again.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11290180 and marked it off-topic.