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Coding exercises are just coding exercises. Sure some maybe stupid, but most are perfectly fine. I’ve been surprised by both who passes and fails them. And yes,

Coding exercises are just coding exercises. Sure some maybe stupid, but most are perfectly fine. I’ve been surprised by both who passes and fails them. And yes, I know good engineers I personally worked with and would vouch for fail them. They are an imperfect test, but usually not an unreasonable one. Occasionally (usually at smaller companies), you’ll get some exercise that’s completely inappropriate for the time allocated, or requires knowing some unobvious trick. One exercise I think of was the time a startup company you know, asked me to write both an IRC server and client in like an hour and a half. The interviewer and I spent a surprisingly long time googling how to open up a port in Python (something I have never had to before or since, and something I hadn’t done at all since maybe 1999), and trying debug terminal settings about why terminal was receiving things twice. None of that is related to the problem at hand, and all could have been solved with a skeleton. Needless to say, this went poorly, and I wasn’t very impressed with them either. However, the only interview I ever refused was with HomeJoy. The interviewer said, “Why don’t you come and spend the day with us, and wow us with what you can do with our data.” Seriously. “Wow us”. No. I’m not going to spend 8 hours on something completely ill defined, subjective, and biased towards a meaningless visualization. It’s not a serious interview, and proposal confirmed my impression of the company form the phone screen.

commandlinefan 7y ago
Yeah, that's kind of where I am with all this - if you're going out of your way to try to stump me, you'll probably succeed, but you're probably going to stump most everybody else, too, and end up not hiring anybody.
- jonathankoren 7y ago
  At a previous job, we were interviewing people, and my manager at the time came up with some interview question and would fail people who didn't get it. I don't remember what it was exactly. You would go through some data multiple times, and calculate some answer. If you were somewhat clever, you could do it in two passes. But there was a trick, where you could do it one. About half the people tested could do it in two passes. I never saw someone do it one. I told my manager his criteria was bullshit and he should stop expecting a one pass solution for a passing mark. Of course, he got all up in arms and said I was stupid for saying that. We grabbed another person on the team, and him do the question. He got a 2-pass solution, and couldn't see the 1-pass solution. So my manager started to explain it, and his explanation was going nowhere. Eventually, we got the entire team around looking at a whiteboard listening to him to try explain this 1-pass solution. Fifteen minutes and seven engineers later, he succeeded, and unironically declared, "I told you it was simple."

commandlinefan 7y ago

Yeah, that's kind of where I am with all this - if you're going out of your way to try to stump me, you'll probably succeed, but you're probably going to stump most everybody else, too, and end up not hiring anybody.

jonathankoren 7y ago
At a previous job, we were interviewing people, and my manager at the time came up with some interview question and would fail people who didn't get it. I don't remember what it was exactly. You would go through some data multiple times, and calculate some answer. If you were somewhat clever, you could do it in two passes. But there was a trick, where you could do it one. About half the people tested could do it in two passes. I never saw someone do it one. I told my manager his criteria was bullshit and he should stop expecting a one pass solution for a passing mark. Of course, he got all up in arms and said I was stupid for saying that. We grabbed another person on the team, and him do the question. He got a 2-pass solution, and couldn't see the 1-pass solution. So my manager started to explain it, and his explanation was going nowhere. Eventually, we got the entire team around looking at a whiteboard listening to him to try explain this 1-pass solution. Fifteen minutes and seven engineers later, he succeeded, and unironically declared, "I told you it was simple."