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What these companies have successfully done is weed out all the great devs who value their time very much. Those who are desperate for a job will spend the 8hrs

What these companies have successfully done is weed out all the great devs who value their time very much. Those who are desperate for a job will spend the 8hrs it takes on these silly tests and make it thru the process. Good developers who can take their choice of jobs will just ignore these companies who think they are being clever to require a test, and just move to some other company what is not showing signs that they will be a pain in the ass to work for. IMO, the more difficult the interview process, the more of a pain in the ass the company is going to be once you're hired. If an interviewer is not capable of determining my knowledge level by a normal interview that tells me right away something up, and I probably don't want to work with them because they aren't too smart themselves.

rhizome 11y ago
What these companies have successfully done is weed out all the great devs who value their time very much I'm not sure I understand this. A dev who valued their time very much would already be working at a job they liked enough not to be looking. As job satisfaction declines, time opens up to work on whatever you want to call this, a technical feeler, perhaps. A dev who values their time wouldn't get snowed under by a ton of these because they wouldn't be applying willy-nilly, only to those places they want to work.
- mamoswined 11y ago
  Not for those of us who have experienced the pain of terrible management and burnout caused by this. The last search I did I was also working 50 hours a week under very poor project management. I had to rule out any prospects that involved meeting with recruiters or these screens. I got a job I liked.
- einarvollset 11y ago
  Not actually all that hard to understand: yes, lots of talented devs who hate wasting time have a job they like. However, N is a big number here, so your assertion on that fails. Also, your assertion that "as job satisfaction declines, time opens up" also does not follow. Plenty of very talented people are both unsatisfied and snowed under with crap. Finally, saying that a Dev wouldn't be snowed under because they wouldn't be applying willy-nilly would hold iff hiring practices at firms where even remotely efficient and fair.
- Retra 11y ago
  And how did such a person learn which places they want to work if not by spending their valuable time looking at all the places they don't?
lawnchair_larry 11y ago
"What these companies have successfully done is weed out all the great devs who value their time very much." That's a feature. They get the good, undervalued talent early. "If an interviewer is not capable of determining my knowledge level by a normal interview that tells me right away something up, and I probably don't want to work with them because they aren't too smart themselves." News flash, all companies are horrible at determining knowledge level by a "normal" interview. The only ones that have a hope are those that use some sort of test or have existing work to review.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
bobbles 11y ago
Good developers who can take their choice of jobs *who are just as likely to leave for another company as soon as something better comes along?
- collyw 11y ago
  You are implying that willingness to take a silly coding test will translate to greater company loyalty?
- PopsiclePete 11y ago
  Ah, yes, loyalty to a company. Because a modern-day public company would never stab its employees in the back or lay them off if Wall Street was unhappy, right?
petervandijck 11y ago
"If an interviewer is not capable of determining my knowledge level by a normal interview" -> So it turns out that mostly, no, you really can't, even though you think you can.
PopsiclePete 11y ago
So you basically dismissed all of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon - all of them. Because, guess what, they all want you coding, sometimes on a computer, sometimes on a white board. And no, they can't determine how awesome you are based on a normal interview process. Nobody can. I've interviewed people with "20+ years of industry experience" who will swear up and down they can hack the Linux kernel but then can't reverse a string in place or write a function that determines if a word is a palindrome or not. Having someone write some code, any code is meant to weed out those muppets. Just show me you can actually write a loop. With an 'if' statement somewhere. Please. That's all I ask. You have 15 years+ experience with SQL server? How about a simple JOIN statement? Please? Now, companies like Google take that too far and I'm 99% positive that the day-to-day job for more than 19/20 people who work there does not involve suffix trees or reverse-printing a linked list through recursion or implementing a stack with two queues, but those are meant to shrink the pool of potential hires from the thousands to the dozens. Nobody wants to sit through a normal interview with thousands of people, better to stump most of them with idiotic, useless quiz questions and interview only a few dozen in person. I get it. I think interviewing for software jobs is horrible everywhere, period. We just have no way to determine if someone is good or not - you can put anything on your resume and it's hard to verify and compare/contrast with other candidates. I believe the solution is to hire someone temporarily for a few months on reduced salary/benefits (which would still be considered an amazing deal for 85% of the work force in the US) and see how they work out - can they actually produce? If so - full time, if not - bye.

rhizome 11y ago

What these companies have successfully done is weed out all the great devs who value their time very much I'm not sure I understand this. A dev who valued their time very much would already be working at a job they liked enough not to be looking. As job satisfaction declines, time opens up to work on whatever you want to call this, a technical feeler, perhaps. A dev who values their time wouldn't get snowed under by a ton of these because they wouldn't be applying willy-nilly, only to those places they want to work.

mamoswined 11y ago
Not for those of us who have experienced the pain of terrible management and burnout caused by this. The last search I did I was also working 50 hours a week under very poor project management. I had to rule out any prospects that involved meeting with recruiters or these screens. I got a job I liked.
einarvollset 11y ago
Not actually all that hard to understand: yes, lots of talented devs who hate wasting time have a job they like. However, N is a big number here, so your assertion on that fails. Also, your assertion that "as job satisfaction declines, time opens up" also does not follow. Plenty of very talented people are both unsatisfied and snowed under with crap. Finally, saying that a Dev wouldn't be snowed under because they wouldn't be applying willy-nilly would hold iff hiring practices at firms where even remotely efficient and fair.
Retra 11y ago
And how did such a person learn which places they want to work if not by spending their valuable time looking at all the places they don't?

lawnchair_larry 11y ago

"What these companies have successfully done is weed out all the great devs who value their time very much." That's a feature. They get the good, undervalued talent early. "If an interviewer is not capable of determining my knowledge level by a normal interview that tells me right away something up, and I probably don't want to work with them because they aren't too smart themselves." News flash, all companies are horrible at determining knowledge level by a "normal" interview. The only ones that have a hope are those that use some sort of test or have existing work to review.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

bobbles 11y ago

Good developers who can take their choice of jobs *who are just as likely to leave for another company as soon as something better comes along?

collyw 11y ago
You are implying that willingness to take a silly coding test will translate to greater company loyalty?
PopsiclePete 11y ago
Ah, yes, loyalty to a company. Because a modern-day public company would never stab its employees in the back or lay them off if Wall Street was unhappy, right?

petervandijck 11y ago

"If an interviewer is not capable of determining my knowledge level by a normal interview" -> So it turns out that mostly, no, you really can't, even though you think you can.

PopsiclePete 11y ago

So you basically dismissed all of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon - all of them. Because, guess what, they all want you coding, sometimes on a computer, sometimes on a white board. And no, they can't determine how awesome you are based on a normal interview process. Nobody can. I've interviewed people with "20+ years of industry experience" who will swear up and down they can hack the Linux kernel but then can't reverse a string in place or write a function that determines if a word is a palindrome or not. Having someone write some code, any code is meant to weed out those muppets. Just show me you can actually write a loop. With an 'if' statement somewhere. Please. That's all I ask. You have 15 years+ experience with SQL server? How about a simple JOIN statement? Please? Now, companies like Google take that too far and I'm 99% positive that the day-to-day job for more than 19/20 people who work there does not involve suffix trees or reverse-printing a linked list through recursion or implementing a stack with two queues, but those are meant to shrink the pool of potential hires from the thousands to the dozens. Nobody wants to sit through a normal interview with thousands of people, better to stump most of them with idiotic, useless quiz questions and interview only a few dozen in person. I get it. I think interviewing for software jobs is horrible everywhere, period. We just have no way to determine if someone is good or not - you can put anything on your resume and it's hard to verify and compare/contrast with other candidates. I believe the solution is to hire someone temporarily for a few months on reduced salary/benefits (which would still be considered an amazing deal for 85% of the work force in the US) and see how they work out - can they actually produce? If so - full time, if not - bye.