Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Please stop the coding challenges

blackentropy.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 493 posts

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#341

Post by bigstrat2003 »

janalsncm wrote: post #286

Frame shift: coding challenges are work. (I don’t care that the assignment is useless for the company, that’s not my problem!) The issue for me is that it is unpaid. If you really want me as a developer, pay me. As an industry, we might even set a standard rate for these homework assignments. I suggest a rate which is enough for me to say it wasn’t a waste of my time. As an anecdote, I was interviewing at a startup t…

Nobody is going to pay candidates for their time during the hiring process. And honestly nor should they. You are not doing work for the company when you do some test to demonstrate your skill.

I'm not in favor of take home "go write this thing" projects, but what you're suggesting isn't a viable answer at all.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#342

Post by sfink »

dahart wrote: post #291
sfink wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Oops, sorry, I think I mangled my conclusion a bit. I'm not against standardizing tests. If it doesn't get in the way of other attributes, standardization is very valuable. It's just that those results aren't enough by themselves.

> 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.

100% agree with this approach.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#344

Post by quectophoton »

paradite wrote: post #118

No leetcode. No coding challenges. No take-home assignments. What is the alternative?

I believe the current best practice in the Art of Hiring, is to hire based on vibes.

Obviously you can't do that publicly because it would affect the company's image, so you still need to have leetcode/coding/takehome steps to keep appearances, even if they don't contribute to the final decision.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#345

Post by mihaitodor »

I refuse to do algorithmic and / or timed coding challenges during interviews and I'm glad to see such articles pop up more frequently. These days, I get a kick out of pointing out to recruiters and managers that both my LinkedIn and GitHub profiles state clearly that I won't accept such interviews and they need to stop wasting my time if this is part of their process.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#346

Post by CharlieDigital »

asdfman123 wrote: post #229
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.…

> It doesn't matter if you've actually designed similar or more complex systems You know you've designed more complex systems. The interview has no way of knowing if that's true, or you're an actor following the "I've designed complex systems" script. And acting talent is arguably more common among the population than programming talent.

I think there are ways to tell by simply asking deep questions about the system someone claims to have built, critiquing the design decisions, diving into why this technology over that technology.

When I've hired or been a part of a hiring process, I always place emphasis on a candidate's past projects and ask deep technical questions around those. I also always review their GitHub repos if one is provided in the profile and I will ask them deep questions about their repos, why they chose this tech or that, interesting pieces of code, design tradeoffs they made, etc.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#347

Post by [deleted] »

tga wrote: post #12

So 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…

[deleted]

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#348

Post by 12_throw_away »

bhhaskin wrote: post #209
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…

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.

> Why would you even do any of that for a senior role?

I used to think like that ... then we hired a batch of 3 "senior" devs who could not do simple, everyday coding tasks, even in their ostensible languages of preference. All had come with exceptional resumés and personal recommendations.

So now, no one at any level one gets hired without demonstrating that they can at least write a fizzbuzz and commit it to a repository.

Now, I doubt that senior engineers in other fields have to do this sort of thing. But, most other engineering fields have licensing/accreditation with accompanying post-graduate academic curricula. We don't (but probably should).

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#349

Post by mihaitodor »

hintymad wrote: post #325

I think the analogy by Steve Yegge still holds: if you claim you're a juggler, you should be able to juggle in front of people at any time. So, yeah, coding challenges is a good filter, at least. The problem is not coding challenge per se, but that people can now cram it on sites like leetcode. See, before we had leetcode, only two types of people could solve a large number of algorithmic problems organically : those…

You know, some people do love devouring works from Knuth and such and still can't pass those tests. Yegge just assumed that such tests work for any type of individual who is willing to study hard, which is simply not true. The frustrating bit is that nobody told me when I embarked on this career path how much I'd have to struggle and put myself through the same traumatising experience over and over just so I can get a job.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#350

Post by wiktor-k »

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?

> All the time.

I guess the minor difference was that it was part of your paid job instead of a huge time sink to get hired.

This is the biggest issue I have with all these tasks is that they take precious time that could be utilized better. In my case: working on real open-source software instead of throwaway made-up problems. (Source: I had to spend 3 days to write a transaction engine toy once and then I didn't get the job for another reason.)

Post reply on HN