Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
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Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#2Sure, yes. I don't like coding interviews that focus on super complicated algorithms where you get a massive advantage from already knowing the subject area, or require a sort of "a ha" realization to solve properly.
When I ask coding questions they tend to be fairly straightforward. Do some basic transformations on data, handle a couple of edge cases (bonus points if you can see the edges of your own code), that's about it.
Don't have candidates redo kmp or a read black tree from scratch on a whiteboard in 30 minutes. That doesn't tell you much about the candidate.
On the extreme other end though, don't use interview questions that rely on a huge amount of background or domain knowledge for your specific team (unless you really need an expert asap and can't ramp them up). You can't expect candidates to burn more than a day on your company.
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#3On the other hand, 2 hours for a tertiary interview after already spending time out is a reasonably significant investment of time for someone who likely already has a position and which I’d suggest isn’t widely required for positions outside of technology. Certainly no management position has a 2 hour examination on processes or people retention strategies in addition to the usual coffee shop discussion or panel interview. I’d be more in the line of reviewing a GitHub if available or a sample application or even just some concepts, implementation can happen in a range of languages but as long as the core is solid that’s what I’d be focusing on that.
The most egregious version of this I’ve seen was an interview for an infrastructure position where the challenge was a generic coding test. That’s fantastic if you want a generic developer but it won’t tell you anything about architectural patterns or common sense. In any case, I’m just a developer and these tools are usually aimed at managers, and since this can at least give a non-technical person a hint of whether a candidate is suitable I guess that’s valuable on its own. I’d be very interested in the tech behind the product offered by this team to evaluate the candidates though...
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#4> When a candidate does run into an interview that represents real-world problems that would need to be solved in the day-to-day of the actual position it’s MIND-BLOWING
But sometimes if I was asked to solved a complicated problem as a take-home test during interview, I might be hesitated to do my best because they might steal my ideas for free like this[1].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/jobs/comments/4tutqr/potential_empl...
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#5Developers hate them because coding tests have devolved into multi-hour, unpaid assignments from which no feedback is given. It's especially bad if they are unwilling (as some seem to be) to have a short phone conversation prior to the coding test to tell you about the project.
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#6On the other hand, 2 hours for a tertiary interview after already spending time out is a reasonably significant investment of time for someone who likely already has a position and which I’d suggest isn’t widely required for positions outside of technology. Certainly no management position has a 2 hour examination on processes or people retention strategies in addition to the usual coffee shop discussion or panel int…
The absolute worst I experienced was an automatically scored coding test.
Given a problem statement and an amount of time, write code and submit against a test suite to be scored.
Half of the tests provided zero information as to what was being tested or what failed, so one was left with a black box to guess what was wrong.
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#7Developers hate them because coding tests have devolved into multi-hour, unpaid assignments from which no feedback is given. It's especially bad if they are unwilling (as some seem to be) to have a short phone conversation prior to the coding test to tell you about the project.
Coding test without a chat first is super annoying and something I flat out refuse. If you can't be bothered to invest 30 minutes, don't expect me to put in n hours.
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#8On the other hand, 2 hours for a tertiary interview after already spending time out is a reasonably significant investment of time for someone who likely already has a position and which I’d suggest isn’t widely required for positions outside of technology. Certainly no management position has a 2 hour examination on processes or people retention strategies in addition to the usual coffee shop discussion or panel int…
The absolute worst I experienced was an automatically scored coding test. Given a problem statement and an amount of time, write code and submit against a test suite to be scored. Half of the tests provided zero information as to what was being tested or what failed, so one was left with a black box to guess what was wrong.
The ones I’ve seen let you add your own test cases (for debugging, not scoring) and expect you to do so. Which seems reasonable to me, on the job you won’t have someone to write all the tests for you.
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#9I don't hate them. What I hate is getting filtered out by HR people with no comprehension of the CS field. Rejecting me on sight for a Java position when I have 5+ years of C# experience is just silly.
Re: Why Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests and What Hiring Managers Can Do
#10What if I told you coding tests were to get the developer to talk through a problem and see how they go about it, rather than actually see them finish it?