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A few years ago I was approached about a new opportunity, and through the course of the interviews I was given a generic fizzbuzz-like coding challenge and I co
by Klathmon 9y ago
A few years ago I was approached about a new opportunity, and through the course of the interviews I was given a generic fizzbuzz-like coding challenge and I completely bombed it. I got flustered, I got stuck on something trivial, and I ended up running out of time with not much to show for it.
It was in a language that I had been using for 5+ years at that point, using a framework that I had just finished architecting a whole application for, had multiple open-source projects in, and the challenge itself was something that I genuinely felt should have been extremely easy, but I miserably bombed it.
I'm almost positive to them I looked like a giant fraud, and to be honest I felt like one too, but after some thinking I really feel that it was just a bad day combined with being uncomfortable without my editor/tools that I use in my day-to-day job that ended with me getting stuck and failing horribly.
I don't know a perfect solution, but when I was later in a position to hire new devs, I avoided coding challenges because of that experience. I feel that you can get MUCH more insight into a developer by just having them talk about what they have done, go into details about problems that they solved, or how they would approach problem X without any writing of code anywhere except maybe some drawings on a whiteboard if necessary.
Coding Challenges to me test 50% "knowing the syntax and not making mistakes" and 50% "knowing how to solve the problem". We have tools and compilers and linters and syntax highlighting and good editors to solve the former in most cases, it's the latter that I'm looking for in a good developer, so why would I use a test that evaluates both of them equally?
- mrfusion 9y agoI think this is most people who “can’t code”. Just nerves I’ve been in that situation myself.
- Klathmon 9y agoIt was like waking up and not knowing your own name, it was such a strange feeling to watch myself fuck up so badly, and be utterly incapable of stopping during the interview. And I wasn't even particularly nervous about getting or not getting the offer either! They approached me, and I wasn't fully sure if I would even like the job yet!
- yojex 9y agoI'm really glad that you and the parent posted these comments. As someone with pretty bad anxiety, this kind of thing prevents me from even going for interviews. And, unfortunately, after browsing this thread it seems that this possibility isn't even on most peoples' minds. FizzBuzz-style filters not only don't prove that someone can code, they don't disprove it either. I'm not sure what the answer is.
- mrfusion 9y agoHonestly if it’s really bad I’d let them know before an interview. Just say something like. I have social anxiety. It doesn’t interfere with my work in any way but I’m wondering if you could accommodate me in the interview by doing x y z. It’s worth a try, right? I’ve thought about doing that.
- nathanaldensr 9y agoSome of the most important skills programmers should have--in my opinion, more important than writing code--are reading code, debugging, adjusting to the project management strategy of the company, and interacting in functional ways with the team.
- Klathmon 9y agoI agree, and yet i've never seen an interview that asks questions about a block of realistic code (not some bullshit minified, uncommented function). Partly because it's not exactly easy to get enough context and understanding about a codebase in an interview to be able to accurately debug something, but also because again it comes back to what you are familiar with. 6 years ago I would be damn good at debugging and optimizing MySQL queries, today I'd probably struggle to get a moderately complicated one to work without a lot of looking things up and trial/error (I mostly work in postgresql now!). That's why I like to ask about their past experience. Tell me your war stories, tell me what you did to figure out that bug that was causing the elusive crash, tell me about your struggles getting webpack setup, talk about how you initially planned to do X but then after issue Y decided to pivot to Z because it was simpler/easier/faster/whatever, explain how you accidentally put a quadratic-complex function into the hot-path of your application that one time and when you found out it was a problem. Just talking about stuff like that can often show where a developer is in their career, what they are good at, how they go about solving problems, etc... And it's almost impossible to cheat/fake it.
- vinhboy 9y agoI had the same experience. It was humiliating.