> When was the last time you had to debug an ancient codebase without documentation or help from a team? Is this a joke?
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Please stop the coding challenges
31–40 of 493 posts
Re: Please stop the coding challenges
#32Remember that in other fields like medicine, finance, academia, and law, getting in involves 5+ years of hoop jumping and commitment signaling that have nothing to do with the final job. We are blessed.
Genuinely curious, knowing nothing about this field: does, for example a neurosurgeon with 15 year of experience, when looking for a new place to work, have to pass surgery "challenges", like doing a lumbar puncture in 15 min on a fake body to prove his experience?
No, but the medical profession has a ridiculous amount of gatekeeping, so you can't become a neurosurgeon with 15 years of experience in the first place (there are maybe a few thousand worldwide). On the other hand anyone with a computer and a curious mind is a software engineer.
Re: Please stop the coding challenges
#33So we should stop the coding challenges, stop LeetCode, stop whiteboarding, stop profiling candidates, stop asking for their GitHub page. How is hiring supposed to work then? Just post the contract online and the first one to mail it back gets the job? I like live coding challenges, something like a ~2 hour pair programming session, ideally modifying an existing project. I invest as much time as each candidate, while…
No, there are other ways, especially as AI coding assistants become more capable and developers can be more productive if they are able to leverage them.
One approach that I've encountered (with a YC company) is that the first interview was actually a code review. One of the founders asked me to review some SQL DDL, some backend API endpoints. The DDL was missing some indices that were needed for the queries. It was using an integer ID field. The API endpoints were missing input validation, error handling, etc.
I thought this was a GREAT way to start an interview that tested for depth of experience and platform/language knowledge.
This actually inspired me to build https://coderev.app because the tooling for this felt like it would be clumsy for both the interviewer and it was certainly for me as the interviewee.
But a lot of times, seeing a candidate's portfolio -- if they have one -- is probably even more insightful than any coding exercise. When I've been on the hiring side, one of my favorite things to do is to look through a candidate's GH and ask them questions about projects they've done, why they chose specific technologies, etc.
Re: Please stop the coding challenges
#34i think we need to come to terms with the reality of coding challenges in the interview process. i know i hate them personally, and dread having to interview again because i'll need to open leet code and remember how to do stupid shit like DFS on a graph, or manipulating linked lists. at the same time, a job opening for a SWE is opening soon in our company and we'll have to somehow filter people, and the job market is such that we'll get MANY applicants, most of them probably wrong for the job. i will probably end up giving them coding challenges (not necessarily leetcode, but some coding challenge for sure), because i need a way to grasp their problem solving and coding skills. i don't know a better way to do it in a condensed time frame of a 1 hour zoom call.
Re: Please stop the coding challenges
#35> This is like asking a Ruby developer to debug PHP as a test of flexibility. Sounds like an OK test to me. Great (senior) developers should be able to do that kind of thing. Categorizing yourself exclusively as "a Ruby developer" is a career trap.
> Categorizing yourself exclusively as "a Ruby developer" is a career trap. And a lucrative one at that.
It’s lucrative if your bar is 6 figures.
No engineer that makes 7 figures calls themselves a ruby developer with the exception of DHH.
Re: Please stop the coding challenges
#36> build a mini-app from scratch in just a few hours
It depends on what kind of functionality we're talking about, but this kind of task is exactly what people at my current startup have been assigned at times. It is absolutely possible to build a CRUD web app with reactive UI using modern tools in a few hours.
> This is like asking a Ruby developer to debug PHP as a test of flexibility
Again it depends on what the debugging task is. At every startup I've worked at, it's expected that an engineer is able to jump into a task that they know very little about. Granted it becomes less reasonable the more niche the task, but PHP and Ruby are not particularly far apart in skillsets in the grand scheme of things. I would expect any web engineer to be able to do this.
> Hiring processes should focus on problem-solving, collaboration, and growth in relevant areas
I agree with this. And, hiring should also focus on technical ability which does include working through difficult and unknown problems by oneself.
Re: Please stop the coding challenges
#37Remember that in other fields like medicine, finance, academia, and law, getting in involves 5+ years of hoop jumping and commitment signaling that have nothing to do with the final job. We are blessed.
True, but someone with 10+ years in those fields doesn't face an interview asking them to prescribe treatment for a cold or explain the difference between civil and criminal law.
Physicians generally have to recertify every 10 years, so yes they kind of do.
Re: Please stop the coding challenges
#38> When was the last time you had to debug an ancient codebase without documentation or help from a team?
> This is like asking a Ruby developer to debug PHP as a test of flexibility
> If the job requires specific tech skills, test those skills
Sounds like someone failed a coding challenge.
In all seriousness, you need to understand that companies rarely implement their hiring practices for the sake of it. It is usually the best their collective minds could come up with. Telling them to get rid of it without attempting to understand what problem they're trying to solve and without offering alternatives, is, to say the least, not a productive use of anyone's time.
I find in software development we try to reinvent the wheel all too often instead of borrowing practices from other professions. Let's have a look at what civil engineers have to go through to get hired at half the salary of a software dev, and let's incorporate that into our practice. That will make everyone a happy trooper !
Re: Please stop the coding challenges
#39> When was the last time you had to debug an ancient codebase without documentation or help from a team?
Yesterday! Working on a large project means there’s always some issue with a dark corner no one has looked at recently and because there’s no team to support, I get to go and bug hunt.
Re: Please stop the coding challenges
#40> What companies often ignore is the extra time candidates invest beyond the “suggested time” for these tests. This is a feature not a bug. Companies are testing if you can focus and complete a hard uncomfortable challenging task, because at your job you’re expected to do things you don’t want to do, but will be rewarded for doing.
Requiring a huge time investment like that will filter out a lot of the non-desperate folks…probably exactly the folks they don’t want to filter out!
Also do they really want to set the tone that “I expect you to intuit what I want and I won’t tell you directly”? Sounds like an awful place to work, right out of the gate.