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Please stop the coding challenges

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Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#361

Post by sathya91 »

I have literally 10 years of experience in Android development (starting with Java and transitioning to Kotlin around seven years ago). There are many topics in Java and Kotlin that are irrelevant to Android development, but I focus only on what I need. I quickly learn and build on new topics when required.

I’m speaking here as a developer who has done more than just bug fixes or UI tweaks. I’ve built apps that have served millions of users. I even have personal projects that currently serve 20–30k users daily, with over 1 million downloads and a 4.9-star rating from 41k reviews. Beyond Android, I have experience managing servers with Nginx, setting up SSL certificates, using Cloudflare, AWS, and Hetzner.

I’ve designed an app with users, posts, and likes, handling both the front-end and back-end using cloud functions and Firebase. From writing Firebase rules to encrypting everything, I understood and implemented it all within a few months. I’ve also written numerous web scrapers in Python for personal projects, which are still in use. While some backend concepts might seem basic, I believe knowing how the backend works is a huge advantage for an Android developer.

Despite all this experience, I recently failed to solve a "number of islands" problem in an interview and got rejected:

Given an m x n 2D binary grid representing a map of '1's (land) and '0's (water), return the number of islands. This left me feeling useless. It made me question whether I’m fit to be a software developer. I studied DSA in college, but now I struggle to recall or prepare for it. Does this mean I’m a poor developer? Does someone who grinds LeetCode just necessarily have better skills in general? Is this what companies want? Are they okay to spend money and time in training someone just grinds LeetCode for the purpose interviews. Does someone who does this just for interviews is likely to stay in same company?

I believe there must be a better way to evaluate candidates. It makes sense to test DSA in campus interviews, where students are fresh and studying it. But for experienced developers, especially for roles like Android development, DSA is rarely relevant to the job requirements.

I’m not saying I can’t practice and do DSA—I can. But it has never been a job requirement for me, and I doubt it ever will be for an Android developer or a similar role. If it’s ever truly needed, I’m confident that most experienced developers, including myself, can excel through research and applied knowledge.

#Kill-DSA

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#362

Post by mrweasel »

ryandrake wrote: post #127
mrweasel wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could also, you know, talk to people, like we did before Google and the Silicon Valley bro-wanna-bes decided that coding interviews was the only solution. I've hired plenty of people without having coding challenges or any form of live coding. I've been happy with all of those hires. A former co-worker did some take-home coding tasks, which they'd then talk to the candidate about during the interview. I feel like…

I admit I've been hired once from just a friendly chit-chat, but I can't see how this could be reliable. There are so many bullshitters in the industry, who, during character creation put all their skill points into Charisma. They are smooth talking, good looking, and have all those charming Ivy League mannerisms of an Investment Banker or Enterprise Sales person. And while they might not be able to be technically de…

I can see your point about the bullshitters being able to fool a VP, but in that case they wouldn't be doing the coding interview anyway.

On the other side we're also seeing bullshitters that can ace any leetcode challenge, but not actually design anything of value or work well with others.

There's probably not a one-size fits all, but if you're going to do coding interview do them well and understand many don't do well in these types of interviews because they don't see the value, or feel that their other skills are being ignored.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#363

Post by dmvdoug »

mrkeen wrote: post #136
dmvdoug wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You: “Coding interviews are the absolute best way to filter job candidates for a software development job.” TFA: Coding interviews are a standard way of hiring. Also you: “Too many people in the software development industry don’t know what they’re doing.” The lack of cognitive dissonance is remarkable.

This is not cognitive dissonance. GP is of the opinion that coding interviews filter out people who can't code.

And they also think the industry is full of people who can’t code. Despite the industry relying on a technique that purports to weed those people out. One might conclude, then, that maybe the technique isn’t as effective after all.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#364

Post by theamk »

bhhaskin wrote: post #257
dahart wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn’t you? How should one evaluate a senior position, in your opinion? Are you suggesting a senior dev shouldn’t need to demonstrate any coding skill? (If not, why not?) Or are you suggesting that there are other faster ways to show coding skills?

I responded to a different comment but it's also relevant here. You're hiring for a senior role, not a junior or mid. Your candidates aren't fresh out of school or just starting their careers. They already have plenty of work experience. They already know how to code and have been doing it for years. A conversation will tell you much more about their approaches to problems solving, team work, and mentoring than a cod…

You'd think so, but during the interviews I did, there are plenty of candidates to senior positions who just cannot code.

They talk the great talk about problem solving and team work and mentoring, but once it's time walk the walk, they just can't seem to write any code - and we are not talking advanced algorithms, we are talking Fizz-Buzz level.

Maybe it's different for doctors, but as long as such people exist and apply to jobs, we need to ask programming questions.

This also means that if _you_ are applying to a job in a larger team for a senior position and they did not ask you for any coding questions, they either:

- Really good for firing people fast for low performance

- Have people at "senior" position which just give advice and nasty code reviews, but don't actually write any code.

Either way, it's a red flag for the company.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#366

Post by ironman1478 »

drdrey wrote: post #358
ironman1478 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For new grads, just let them in. Just make sure they know something so a simple coding exercise is maybe good there. For more senior people, actually talk about their resumes and try to understand what they did, why they did it, and importantly, if they actually did it. I never got asked anything about my previous experience when I got into my first faang beyond some superficial things like "what tools did you use".

I've seen interviews where you actually have to present a thing you've done and then explain the decision making process behind it, tradeoffs, outcomes, etc. those are more common outside of CS and I'd like to see more of that in CS. Or hell, have them write an essay describing the tradeoffs about some theoretical engineering decision. That'll give me actual info on how a person thinks.

For context, I used to work in self driving cars and had to interview many people who claimed to work in that field and claim to have worked on huge projects themselves. Then you dig deeper and it turns out they were part of a huge group, they never heard of this problem, that problem, never heard of this industry standard, etc. it's like, forget coding, this person doesn't even know the domain as much as they claim and not being upfront about that disqualifies you immediately in my books.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#367

Post by mihaitodor »

hintymad wrote: post #356
mihaitodor wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, and all I'm saying is that it's possible to have a software engineer career without putting yourself through such tests. Yes, it's harder to find decent jobs, but it pains me so much when I see people giving up after years of effort just because they're not aware they can get hired and practice what they enjoy doing without having to pass such tests.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#369

Post by gcanyon »

I’m a product manager, not a developer, although I used to be a developer a long time ago in a language far far away.

A few months before my last interview I had taken up Python by solving about fifty projecteuler.net problems. I’m not fluent, but capable, and since no one is hiring me to write code anyway, I put it on my resume.

At my interview with a CTO he said, I see you have Python on your resume? “Yep,” I answered, and said pretty much the above.

“Do you mind if I open a shared session to code in”

“Sure” (I haven’t coded in front of someone…ever?)

“Do you know what Fibonacci numbers are?”

“Yes”

“Can you write me a function to return the Nth Fibonacci?”

That’s clearly not a very hard task, and fortunately I was up to the task and got the job.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#370

Post by alkonaut »

John_Cena wrote: post #297
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…

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.

If I'm interviewing for people to work in some specific tech stack or business, it's just as good to see completely different things they can show. Could be a php site for their book club or whatever. But the key is to have some code to discuss that is their code. Because I want to see them describe and reason about code they know, and it works 10x better if it's code they know, rather than some code I present and say "here, let's reason about this code".
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