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

Ask HN: Can you actually get a dev job without doing a stupid quiz?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 68 posts

Re: Ask HN: Can you actually get a dev job without doing a stupid quiz?

#51

Post by johan_larson »

wolfgke wrote: post #50
geezerjay wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because paying is the problem, and expecting that prospective employers would pay for your expenses for a test that is used to infer basic competences is at best wishful thinking. We only need to look at the current state of qualification mills/moocs to get a good idea how job seekers would be fleeced by these so called certification systems. It's far better to get in front of a prospective employer and solve whitebo…

> Because paying is the problem, and expecting that prospective employers would pay for your expenses for a test that is used to infer basic competences is at best wishful thinking. I am cautious with this kind of statement, since this saves the respective company time to check these competencies by itself, which is a pecuniary advantage for the company (since it can obiously use this time to earn money).

I imagine a 2-3 hour test that costs something like $200, which seems like a reasonable investment, if many or most employers are looking for it. For the companies, it would save an hour or two of interviewing. If they accepted the test as indicative of basic coding sanity, they could then focus their interviews on more general or domain-related skills.

Re: Ask HN: Can you actually get a dev job without doing a stupid quiz?

#52

Post by diggernet »

rpeden wrote: post #37

There are lots of companies that don't do these kinds of tests. It's been a while since I've done a job search, but several people I know have done them recently. And they've all found that some companies - mainly big tech companies, along with tech startups of all kinds - use these kinds of tests heavily. Other companies that hire lots of developers - like banks, insurance companies, and manufacturers - don't seem t…

Another thing the non-tech companies you mention will sometimes do is contract-to-hire. The hiring process for my current job at $BigBank was: Phone screen with recruiter. One hour interview with a couple developers. Follow up phone call with manager. That's it. Because CTH gives them months to evaluate actual skills in a real work environment before deciding whether to convert you or let you go.

It's a great arrangement for those of us who do really good work but tend to interview poorly. Probably not so popular with those who BS well in an interview but can't back it up...

The pay isn't FANG, but can be decent if your manager likes your work and you don't let HR lowball you.

Re: Ask HN: Can you actually get a dev job without doing a stupid quiz?

#53

Post by geezerjay »

johan_larson wrote: post #51
wolfgke wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because paying is the problem, and expecting that prospective employers would pay for your expenses for a test that is used to infer basic competences is at best wishful thinking. I am cautious with this kind of statement, since this saves the respective company time to check these competencies by itself, which is a pecuniary advantage for the company (since it can obiously use this time to earn money).

I imagine a 2-3 hour test that costs something like $200, which seems like a reasonable investment, if many or most employers are looking for it. For the companies, it would save an hour or two of interviewing. If they accepted the test as indicative of basic coding sanity, they could then focus their interviews on more general or domain-related skills.

> I imagine a 2-3 hour test that costs something like $200, which seems like a reasonable investment

Nowadays you get the same result or even a better one by spending zero to do the prospective employer's test. It is not an investment nor it is reasonable. Companies already dump preliminary screening on specialized HR companies.

Re: Ask HN: Can you actually get a dev job without doing a stupid quiz?

#54

Post by peterhi »

50 wrote: post #39
peterhi wrote: post #27

Unless I have copious free time (and I don't) then I'm not going to browse 130 Github repositories and wouldn't known from Adam if they are forks or not (unless they were all created close together). Thus I cannot trust the metrics from them either LinkedIn, blogs - not exactly reliable sources of information given they are what you are saying about yourself. We've had candidates list the number of Instagram likes th…

Would you say then an online persona doesn’t matter much? I think about this a bit as an undergraduate hoping to land a gig in a few years. I could care less about having a technical blog or a tailored Github/Gitlab account contributing to open source or having an LinkedIn account, I just want to build cool stuff and become a good programmer and not have to worry about showcasing that on the internet like a clown in…

LinkedIn is just an online CV for recruiters to find you by. The one you submit should be tailored to the job you are applying for

The CV that lands on my desk will determine if you get called for an interview. One or two sides of A4 is all you need. We only look at Github if the CV is interesting enough

If your CV says 'I have a CS degree' rather than 'I am a programmer' then I'm not going to look any further. I have employed excellent programmers this way. Only one of them had a Github account. None wrote blogs. Didn't even look at LinkedIn

Github can be interesting to see what languages you work in and what topics you found interesting when satisfying your own needs. But I will only look if the CV makes me think that it will be interesting

Github, LinkedIn and blog posts are merely supporting documents for your CV. If the CV sucks then it goes no further

Re: Ask HN: Can you actually get a dev job without doing a stupid quiz?

#55

Post by khacking »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #12
GuiA wrote: post #8

Let me preface this by saying I despise whiteboarding as much as you do. I’ve been rejected from jobs dozens of time, and only got a handful of job offers in my ~10 year career so far. But - all interviews are, in essence, is an exercise in virtue signaling. Can you do the local dance to prove that you belong? If anything, whiteboard interviews are not the worst thing ever. I am from a Western European country, and m…

My first boss used to do a short quiz just to weed out anyone that was wasting his time and that was that. But of course programming culture is hypertoxic so that's been turned into the roommate interview scene in Shallow Grave.

Could you expand on that, what is toxic about programming culture where you are?

Re: Ask HN: Can you actually get a dev job without doing a stupid quiz?

#56

Post by eksimba »

50 wrote: post #39
peterhi wrote: post #27

Unless I have copious free time (and I don't) then I'm not going to browse 130 Github repositories and wouldn't known from Adam if they are forks or not (unless they were all created close together). Thus I cannot trust the metrics from them either LinkedIn, blogs - not exactly reliable sources of information given they are what you are saying about yourself. We've had candidates list the number of Instagram likes th…

Would you say then an online persona doesn’t matter much? I think about this a bit as an undergraduate hoping to land a gig in a few years. I could care less about having a technical blog or a tailored Github/Gitlab account contributing to open source or having an LinkedIn account, I just want to build cool stuff and become a good programmer and not have to worry about showcasing that on the internet like a clown in…

An online persona is like client-side data validation. It's a nice to have, but it cannot be trusted. You should always have server-side validation anyway. That's what tests/assignments/interviews are for.

Re: Ask HN: Can you actually get a dev job without doing a stupid quiz?

#58

Post by thepp1983 »

alchemism wrote: post #41
thepp1983 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming culture is not hypertoxic. Maybe it is in the United States in the UK pretty much everyone just sits down and gets on with it.

Speaking personally, I was a bit surprised at the culture I experienced the first time I worked alongside younger American programmers, as opposed to my prior experiences with remote offshore teammembers, onshore H1B programmers, and the American greybeards from the earlier IT era.

In my general experience. I think with younger men in their twenties it can be a little difficult if management lets them get away with being a bit too unprofessional. They wanna prove themselves so sometimes a bit too much testorone in the room can cause a few arguments. Once everyone is past 30 that normally stops.

Indian developers in the UK have essentially got won the Willy Wonka Gold ticket as the salaries in the UK are much higher and they just work 12+ hours a day and keep their heads down. There is a higher number of female developers in my experience come over. But that could be just my impressions.

Re: Ask HN: Can you actually get a dev job without doing a stupid quiz?

#59

Post by thepp1983 »

Jach wrote: post #49
dasmoth wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However I've been to job interviews where they force me to code live in front of several people and I couldn't get half a line of code out before one of them will chip in with a "suggestion" breaking my train of thought. The code they want me to write is some algorithm that they have expected you to memorise. This could actually be the test in itself. There seems to be a substantial contigent who believe that this is…

Great point on this possibility... A big source of brokenness with tech interviews is that so many interviewers want to setup an interview (often adversarial, where the interviewer holds more cards) where candidates get ranked primarily on subjective hidden variables. If the real test isn't the given test, the interviewer sucks. Measure as directly as you can what you care about, whether it's technical criteria or so…

A slight aside. I had a really good coding assignment once.

It simply said "Make a working clone of this webpage, zip it up and file it to us".

I could have just nicked the jQuery code (this was before a lot of the frameworks have taken off and everyone abused jQuery and I worked at a place that used vanilla js for performance).

https://pastebin.com/NvGm89cR

Re: Ask HN: Can you actually get a dev job without doing a stupid quiz?

#60

Post by _ah »

ivanstegic wrote: post #34
sawmurai wrote: post #23

I think the only interviewing process that really works is to invite the candidate to work for one day, side by side with their future team. This also gives the candidate a glimpse into the culture behind the HR marketing bs.

Agree. We just recently went through a failed employee hire (even though we had a mini project for the candidate) and in the retrospective we came to the conclusion that our whole team was first hired as a contractor and then later converted to an employee. So we’re going to just keep doing that from now on.

You do lose some candidates this way. If I'm already leaping from one stable job, I'm not going to roll the dice on a contract position. Sure it will probably work out, but everyone should already know not to trust promises made during the recruiting process.
Post reply on HN