Please stop the coding challenges

To reinforce, an task I had when interviewing was to solve an issue with a webapp written in a language I had never used and a webserver I had never used.

It wasn't that hard if you know the fundamentals (http, ssl). It was sorta fun and I got the job.

I'm your average skilled introverted engineer. But after more than a dozen years of experience and problem solving, I'd go with #2. I feel i'd be able to explain myself much more easily, have to do much less work, and probably have much more ways to impress the interviewers with face to face. I have also been on the receiving side of take-home tests and I know how hard it is to impress someone with those.

> Hiring processes should focus on problem-solving, collaboration, and growth in relevant areas.

Agreed. When I think about the best engineers I've worked with-- and the worst-- I have identified certain characteristics that I want to look for in a candidate, and certain characteristics that I must avoid.

In particular, there are certain people who just can't entertain any thought or design idea that they themselves did not have. This makes them very hard to collaborate with, except in the cases where what we need to do just happens to coincide with what they are thinking. Related, there are certain people who can only think about exactly one way to solve a problem, and there is not room in their brain to honestly consider any alternative approaches. These people tend to be really bad team players. A good engineer will understand that there's no one right way to do certain kinds of things, that everything comes with tradeoffs.

During interviews I present coding problems where there is more than one way to attack the problem. Whatever approach the candidate does, I propose an alternative approach and ask them to talk with me about the pros and cons of the alternative approach. I also ask for them to extend upon the alternative approach and make it better. For a significant fraction of candidates, they just can't entertain any other way of doing the thing, there just isn't room in their brain to consider alternative approaches.

Ability to really listen and give an honest consideration for other people's ideas is a vital part of the kind of team culture we need to succeed, so I look for that in interviews. Long ago I abandoned worrying about leetcode in interviews, and nobody in more senior management has made me stop yet, and this is at a big tech company.

I feel your pain. I've got similar amount of experience in my own area, I've been part of several successful software projects, and I have several popular open-source projects that I'm maintaining, but it all seemed to not matter a whole lot as I slogged month after month through interviews with rejection after rejection.

All I can say is that perhaps all those places that reject you are not actually the places where you really would like to work.

At one point I managed to get a job at a company which from the outside looked like a really cool place to work in. However all these interviews painted a very different picture of the work that I was actually assigned to do. I felt like I was being paid a senior engineer salary to do the job of a junior engineer. I was utterly bored and I complained that it's too boring and way below my skill level. This ended up getting me fired. Strangely, I've never had so many work-mates expressing to me how sad they are that I'm leaving. Several of them left the company not long after me.

Currently I'm in a happier place. Not getting as big of a salary but having an opportunity to work on a way more interesting software. And how did I land this job... after a single short interview they told me: would you like to start tomorrow?

I second all of that heartily. Of course the senior eng with 10 years hands-on experience at a household name tech company knows how to code... except that they don't. At all, apparently. That seems so ludicrously unlikely unless you've actually interviewed a lot of people, then it's just the sad fact.

To others reading along, I'm not talking about someone not being able to write a multitasking OS on their own. I mean, I'm not sure how these people possibly graduated college not knowing how to write a trivial program in the language of their choosing. Turns out you can get surprisingly far into a software engineering degree without every writing code. I wouldn't have believed it. Evidence proves it though.