61–70 of 493 posts
I'm fine with tests, but only if companies pay a standard fee (say, $100) for a dev's time. If a company doesn't respect your time during the interview process, it probably won't while you're on the job.
This is such an out-of-touch and ridiculous thing to say
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Categorizing yourself exclusively as "a Ruby developer" is a career trap. And a lucrative one at that.
It’s lucrative if your bar is 6 figures. No engineer that makes 7 figures calls themselves a ruby developer with the exception of DHH.
> What companies often ignore is the extra time candidates invest beyond the “suggested time” for these tests. This is a feature not a bug. Companies are testing if you can focus and complete a hard uncomfortable challenging task, because at your job you’re expected to do things you don’t want to do, but will be rewarded for doing.
Requiring a huge time investment like that will filter out a lot of the non-desperate folks…probably exactly the folks they don’t want to filter out! Also do they really want to set the tone that “I expect you to intuit what I want and I won’t tell you directly”? Sounds like an awful place to work, right out of the gate.
I have only once had this be a problem and in a way, it was my fault for not noting the ambiguity in the submission. Every other time I have dropped a comment saying "you could have intended A, but also could have intended B so this is when I go back to product and request more information."
Lol, I'm pretty sure that's been my job description for the past 20 years.
"Thank you for sending that along. I would like to withdraw my application for this position."
> This is like asking a Ruby developer to debug PHP as a test of flexibility. Sounds like an OK test to me. Great (senior) developers should be able to do that kind of thing. Categorizing yourself exclusively as "a Ruby developer" is a career trap.
> Categorizing yourself exclusively as "a Ruby developer" is a career trap. And a lucrative one at that.
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 that stay relevant across waves of technological disruption.
So we should stop the coding challenges, stop LeetCode, stop whiteboarding, stop profiling candidates, stop asking for their GitHub page. How is hiring supposed to work then? Just post the contract online and the first one to mail it back gets the job? I like live coding challenges, something like a ~2 hour pair programming session, ideally modifying an existing project. I invest as much time as each candidate, while…
What is left is networking and referrals, which I suspect people also object to.
do you show them a quick'n'dirty solution that ignores edge cases but shows i'm a pragmatic and not going to overcomplicate things?
OR
do you show something fancy that you'd never actually do in an real codebase that shows off my depth of knowledge and where my ceiling is?
> What companies often ignore is the extra time candidates invest beyond the “suggested time” for these tests. This is a feature not a bug. Companies are testing if you can focus and complete a hard uncomfortable challenging task, because at your job you’re expected to do things you don’t want to do, but will be rewarded for doing.