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Please stop the coding challenges

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Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#291

Post by dahart »

sfink wrote: post #272
dahart wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 goin…

Highly agree with all of that, perhaps save the conclusion. I still try to standardize the interview process, but we have enough different kinds of interview phases to capture different strengths and weaknesses of candidates. I still want the interview to be fair even when people respond very differently. You’re right that it doesn’t often come anywhere close to a tie. But sometimes candidates aren’t vocal and don’t vouch for themselves strongly but they are great coders, and sometimes people are talkative and sell themselves very well but when it comes down to technical ability they aren’t amazing. The choice of coding interview could obscure some of that, so mainly I include other parts to the interview, though I’m still interested in how to compare someone who does take home coding to someone who does the live pair programming, for example. I kinda want to see how candidates handle both. ;)

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#292

Post by alkonaut »

bhhaskin wrote: post #269
alkonaut wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes exactly. The code IS the cv of a developer.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#293

Post by theamk »

exe34 wrote: post #182
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #131

Earlier 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.

This will strongly favor people who believe that that they cannot get a good job, because if a candidate has multiple offers, why would they choose probation vs regular job?

(Note I am saying people who "believe" they cannot get a good job. This would be people who worry a lot, people with unusual experiences that other companies avoid, and under-performers who got fired. I am sure there will be some great hires in those groups, but likely less than during regular hiring)

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#294

Post by Ancapistani »

portaouflop wrote: post #79
epicureanideal wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the gatekeeping reliably ensure quality, or just filter down the quantity of doctors?

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…

> 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?

My answer is that I don't have access to what I'd really like to base that judgment upon: their success rate, adjusted for the difficulty of the procedure.

Simpler, less-risky procedures would therefore have a lower skill/experience bar.

Basically, I'd want someone with decades of experiences to remove a tumor deep inside my brain, but I'd be much more willing to use someone who learned via YouTube this time last year if I'd suffered a TBI and was experiencing swelling and intra-cranial pressure.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#295

Post by Loudergood »

momojo wrote: post #268
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Assuming it's reference to Santa Cruz Operations.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#296

Post by ramonverse »

Non paid solo-coding assessments should disappear. Many disrespectful companies send it automatically to all applicants to don't even look at them after.

Every time I get those I request to do a live coding assessment, if they are not willing to lose even 1h of their time they were not serious about you.

If you decide your process really requires a solo assignment you can offer a gift card to prove you appreciate the candidate (and don't be stingy, you are already saving a lot of money by not having 1 of your engineers interview)

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#297

Post by John_Cena »

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…

The elitism is rampant. As an embedded sector guy everyone thinks every other RTOS isn't a real RTOS and the knowledge and wisdom don't translate.

Every time I find some open source I would contribute to, what I wanted to implement is already there or is already in the works. I'm not going to change shit just to change it. I'll buy them a coffee tip and leave.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#298

Post by ratorx »

sanderjd wrote: post #181
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…

Yeah, in some ways I like "system design" type questions, because at least it's pretty creative and more like what I do at work than writing some little algorithm with a custom data structure. But on the other hand, it's also not a very strong signal for my years of experience working on and designing portions of systems. I've never actually done "design a system from scratch", because every system that is big and co…

I think the context is important in the question. I’d argue that a system design question is optimally answered differently depending on the size of the company and the scope of the internal tech stack.

Doing more of the design up front is important in a big tech environment almost all the time because:

a) many different possible infrastructure (eg. databases) are already at your fingertips, so the operational cost to using a new one is a lot lower. Also, cross-organisation standardisation is usually more important than this marginal extra local operational cost.

b) scale makes a big difference. Usually good system design questions are explicit about the scale. It is a bit different to systems where the growth might be more organic.

c) iteration is probably way more expensive for production facing systems than in a smaller company, because everything is behind gradual rollouts (both manual and automated) and migration can be pretty involved. E.g. changing anything at all will take 1 week minimum and usually more. That’s not to say there is no iteration, but it is usually a result of an external stimulus (scale change, new feature, unmodelled dependency etc), rather than iteration towards an MVP.

Now, a lot of this is pretty implicit and it is hard to understand the environment unless you’ve worked in a different company of the same scale. But just wanted to point out that there is a reason that it is the way it is.

Source: SRE at Google

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#299

Post by bhhaskin »

John_Cena wrote: post #289
bhhaskin wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm a senior developer and my github is half guitar tabs. I'm not interested in peacocking. Maybe it's because Hackaday refused to put my name on the article with my senior design project years ago and I just don't want to play the game.

And that might be hurting you in the long run. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#300

Post by collingreen »

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.…

Did you also post this in another comment recently (yesterday?)
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