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Please stop the coding challenges

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Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#351

Post by paxys »

ryandrake wrote: post #110
paxys wrote: post #75

The more people online complain about coding interviews, the more confident I am that they are the absolute best way to filter candidates for a software development job. Across the industry there are way too many talkers/pretenders/meeting schedulers and not enough people who can roll up their sleeves, jump into the code and actually get stuff done. And this problem becomes worse at higher levels. You can bitch about…

Yea, I happen to hate coding challenges, but not because they're hard--because they bias towards "people who have time to do coding challenges". That said you're absolutely right about how many phonies are in the industry and coding tests are probably the best we have to weed them out.

This goes beyond software interviews and is just how the world works.

"I want to work for your company"

"Ok, prove yourself"

"Sorry, I don't have time"

How do you expect that conversation to go from there? If you don't have time then make time. It isn't anyone's problem but your own.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#352

Post by andrew_eu »

I did hundreds of interviews for a former employer (10k+ employees) and developed a fondness for in-person coding interviews. In particular I would tell the candidate up front that the goal of the exercise is to see how they collaborate on a problem, how they communicate about their thinking, etc. The problem itself was considered too easy by many of my colleagues, but I still found it an extremely useful for the seniority and capability of engineers.

A later employer was in the hiring tech space, enabling this kind of take home exercises. Lots of time was invested into getting signals as the developer was doing it because everyone knew that's just as valuable, if not more, than the final solution. But many companies using these take-home exercises do it just to filter out candidates. To them, it's a proof-of-work system that helps regulate the intake of their hiring funnels.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#353

Post by ololobus »

I hear it all the time ‘coding interviews are useless’, ‘peer review in scientific journals is broken’ and so on and so on.

I’d say yes and no.

Yes, these are the problems that cannot be solved perfectly.

No, because in such areas any ‘reasonable’ filter is better than nothing. People say that these assignments don’t have anything with reality, but, well, we don’t have months to try to work with each other, we only have 3x1h.

I worked as individual contributor for years, but also had a chance to try a hiring manager role for the past 3 years a lot. We do standard leetcode-style interview (without hardcore) + system design. And I always consider both as a starter and bite to see how the candidate behaves; talks; do they ask questions to clarify something and how. And I always try to help if I see that candidate is stuck. By the end of all interviews you will have some signal, not a comprehensive personality profile. Do we do mistakes? I’m pretty sure, yes. But I think it just works statistically.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#354

Post by olddustytrail »

bluedino wrote: post #333
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…

> Instead, they put developers in situations they’d never face in the workplace, where collaboration and support are standard. I thought the page was satire at first.

Collaboration and support being standard seem very much like situations you'd never face in the workplace. No satire there.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#355

Post by liontwist »

ericmcer wrote: post #153
liontwist wrote: post #4

Remember 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.

I have a couple family members who are doctors. Medical school and residency were nightmares, but after that they are golden. One of them works one week a month and makes 400k. Others have pretty cushy 9-5s and are taking home ludicrous salaries. They are also pretty recession proof and their salaries are fairly immune to economic pressures. I don't think mass doctor layoffs happened in 2008 or 2022. With software yo…

> but after that they are golden.

Of course. They paid an enormous cost and beat other competitors for that privilege which is carefully guarded by regulation and certification boards.

No doubt software has more instability, but the trade off is that you don’t have to do that multi year grind. Easier fire, easier hire. Similar pay.

> skillset is always a few years away from being outdated.

I strongly disagree with this. In your example you use “crypto” and “llm”. If this is your skill set you are fad chasing and needlessly increasing your exposure to changing markets.

Engineers solve problems by applying math and science expertise. This is a timeless skill.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#356

Post by hintymad »

mihaitodor wrote: post #349
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…

No argument about it. I was just explaining from the perspective of the companies. Per another thread, the companies usually do not care about false negatives and they recognize that there will be false positives. In the meantime, they get so many resumes so they can afford having false negatives. Case in point, even IBM got tens of thousands of resumes every week in the 2000s.

Not that I can pass the interviews, by the way, and I definitely don't want to prepare for such coding challenges. I'm just trying to explain the phenomena as an observer.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#357

Post by alkonaut »

tayo42 wrote: post #306
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.

All of the meaningful code I write is private for the company I work for. This is how most code is stored.

Mine too. Or 99.99% of it at least. But if I were to apply for a job, I'd focus more on having at least a little repo of something to show, than on polishing my CV or doing leetcode excercises. That 0.01% code I wrote which is my github is my CV. That 99.99% I wrote for my last employer won't be seen by my next employer.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#358

Post by drdrey »

ironman1478 wrote: post #163
paxys wrote: post #75

The more people online complain about coding interviews, the more confident I am that they are the absolute best way to filter candidates for a software development job. Across the industry there are way too many talkers/pretenders/meeting schedulers and not enough people who can roll up their sleeves, jump into the code and actually get stuff done. And this problem becomes worse at higher levels. You can bitch about…

I am good at passing these interviews and am at a faang (will be moving to another one this month). These interviews are useless and provide a false signal on problem solving skills and people's abilities to learn things. The interviews specifically don't test whether or not somebody can roll up their sleeves and jump into code, because if it did why do I as a new hire have to explain so much about software engineeri…

what do you think would be a better test?

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#359

Post by liontwist »

TrackerFF wrote: post #58
liontwist wrote: post #4

Remember 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.

Dunno, all my "normal" engineering job interviews just revolved around my previous work, going through big picture design problems, and specific things related to the job. Didn't have to solve PDE's on the whiteboard, or regurgitate integral transformations.

Normal engineering isn’t a vehicle to the upper middle class. Supply of engineering degree holders (challenging) is much closer to demand.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#360

Post by plantwallshoe »

0xmarcin wrote: post #117
paxys wrote: post #75

The more people online complain about coding interviews, the more confident I am that they are the absolute best way to filter candidates for a software development job. Across the industry there are way too many talkers/pretenders/meeting schedulers and not enough people who can roll up their sleeves, jump into the code and actually get stuff done. And this problem becomes worse at higher levels. You can bitch about…

Maybe there were in the past, currently there is entire industry there to help you game the system. - Cracking the coding interview. - Elements of programming interviews in Java|Python|whatever... - leetcode & other sides with paid premium subscriptions... - mock interview bootcamps... It's no longer about skill, it's only about gaming the system.

What do you mean “gaming the system”?

The companies ask that candidates learn how to solve algorithm problems and the candidates do it.

I would call it “everyone playing a game they agreed to play by the rules they agreed to play with.”

And I don’t know what you mean by “it’s no longer about skill.” It still takes a lot of skill to be able to solve hard algorithm problems, even if you took a course on how to solve them and practiced solving them for 6 months.

When you audition for an orchestra they give you the sheet music ahead of time. It doesn’t mean you have no skill if you practice first instead of just showing up to sight read the music.

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