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Please stop the coding challenges

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Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#471

Post by makk »

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #66
makk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Categorizing yourself exclusively as "a Ruby developer" is a career trap. And a lucrative one at that.

In the short term. And then the entire industry experiences some kind of a technological shift, as it will for many more cycles, and you're jobless as early as the first wave. It's ridiculous how developers mindlessly accept that you should constantly be learning to keep yourself relevant, but keep it shallow by just jumping from one tool to another, instead of encouraging deeper knowledge of generalizable patterns t…

Yep. Craftspeople take their craft seriously, sweat the details, learn the patterns, go deep.

And that’s complimentary with marketing oneself as Ruby/Rails dev or whatever else the market needs at the time.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#472

Post by makk »

em-bee wrote: post #277
ryandrake wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I managed to ride a nice maybe 8 year wave as an "OpenGL expert" but the industry moved on and I didn't go more general with 3D graphics to climb out of my niche. I haven't been in that industry since the OpenGL waterline crested and went back out to sea. Learned that lesson. Be a generalist. Yes, deep specialists exist and yes, some of them have successful careers based on their deep specialty, but betting…

that's what i am trying to explain in every job application. but almost every job description expects multiple years of experience with a very specific tech stack. so far being a generalist with senior level experience did not yield a single positive response, let alone an offer.

So frustrating. Keep trying! You’ll find someone who values your background.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#473

Post by zelphirkalt »

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…

It is not only about FAANG though. owadays every tiny fart of a company feels entitled to have a hiring process like that and not pay FAANG salaries.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#474

Post by zelphirkalt »

paxys wrote: post #444
kristopolous wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not it though. Pretend I was hiring a restaurant chef and the industry standard test was "run a mile in 4 minutes", a test that 98% of all candidates fail! So professional chefs practice by jogging daily so they could prove themselves during the famous "run a 4 minute mile" weeding test so they can be hired to prepare meals for people. That's what we're talking about here. I've had to write out the mathematica…

Hiring professional chefs is actually a great parallel. "Chop an onion" or "make a french omelette" are basic tests that even the most experienced chefs being hired for top positions will have to go through. "But this isn't relevant to my job, a subordinate will always do this kind of stuff." "We are a fine dining dinner restaurant, I'll never need to make an omelette." Doesn't matter, make a damn omelette. If you ca…

And even that isn't really true. Rarely people will have to work with anything but the most basic usually language builtin data structures. Usually people glue together a few libraries and build some CRUD.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#475

Post by zelphirkalt »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #170
0xmarcin wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Typical table stakes prep work for a high paying job with a lot of competition. I’m serious. It’s not even guaranteed you’ll get the job if you do the above but everyone who passed the big tech interviews will acknowledge they fucking studied for it. What do expect here?

But who is talking about big tech? Aren't we talking about just most companies here? I have had some interviews and every single one of them had broken hiring processes, silly reviewers, who get stuck up at things like you not using their favorite code autoformatter, for code that is 1 screen long, or did the ghost job thing, where they apparently did not actually want to hire anyone.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#476

Post by honestAbe22 »

anankaie wrote: post #447
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where are these dev jobs where _don't_ have to figure out some mysterious issue in a barely maintained GitHub repo semi-regularly? Oh, my job is one of those. Our code is in Perforce.

This is the most Software Engineer answer. Emphasizing only the distinctions that make no difference :D

[dead]

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#478

Post by deterministic »

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…

Yep all the time. 30+ years old C/C++ large scale software used by companies you have heard about around the world.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#479

Post by cess11 »

unoti wrote: post #470
cess11 wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're speaking from a position of great privilege where putting in a month or two of free labour doesn't impact your life much, maybe because you have money, or because you don't have kids. Whether someone demonstrates a willingness to dive in deep and learn things I catch with an entirely different technique, like putting them into contact with a new programming language. Filtering out people with experience from "…

Actually I put in that work myself, while working, and while raising kids. It took me a lot longer than a month or two. It took a ridiculous, embarrassing amount of time. > And those I've met were absolutely insufferable and incompetent. I understand this last part, and annoying and insufferable people absolutely do exist. But consider that you may be generalizing and discriminating against a pretty big pool of peopl…

No way. If someone has worked in one of those companies and tells me about it, then they're tainted by it, similar to how they would be from having worked at Raytheon or whatever.

If they have the sense to try and hide their "FAANG" background I might consider them.

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