4 ms·

What 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?

codingslave 7y ago
I would tell you all the tough to get into companies only hire candidates that answer correctly.
- solipsism 7y ago
  This is dead wrong.
- monster_group 7y ago
  I agree. "We see the candidate's thought process / approach" is all bullshit. If you didn't solve the problem, you are not getting in. It also doesn't matter how you perform in the non-coding (system-design and leadership / behavioral) interviews if you didn't solve the coding problems correctly.
EliRivers 7y ago
I'd point to the automated coding tests that involve zero talking and give the company a simple numerical score on which to assess the candidate and ask you what about those? I'd also point to the companies that put a candidate alone in a room with the test and wait for the candidate to finish, again dismissing the candidate if they don't produce an answer that matches.
- EliRivers 7y ago
  Full disclosure; I screwed up one of those enormously several years ago when I just couldn't remember the C++ std function for turning a string into an int. Was it toString? tostring? stringify? No, that's crazy, none of the std has "ify" on the end. I must be thinking of some other framework I used once. What about intToString? No, that can't be it. itos? itoa? That's not standard. They've given me locked down web access to a C++ reference (and nothing else), I can just use that. WTF - this isn't cppreference.com. I suppose I could open up the header and ... oh, it includes a bunch more headers, and string of course is itself really basic_string<char> so I'm going to be searching through a lot of template... Suffice to say I was looking for to_string, and what I did was blow through too much of my time trying to remember this, and writing my own function to do it instead, which worked fine, but then I ran out of time and didn't finish all the tasks in the time permitted. For want of remembering to_string.
blunte 7y ago
I wouldn't believe you, unless you qualified it by saying "some coding tests". What you describe is how they should be, imo. But it's absolutely not what I have experienced.

codingslave 7y ago

I would tell you all the tough to get into companies only hire candidates that answer correctly.

solipsism 7y ago
This is dead wrong.
monster_group 7y ago
I agree. "We see the candidate's thought process / approach" is all bullshit. If you didn't solve the problem, you are not getting in. It also doesn't matter how you perform in the non-coding (system-design and leadership / behavioral) interviews if you didn't solve the coding problems correctly.

EliRivers 7y ago

I'd point to the automated coding tests that involve zero talking and give the company a simple numerical score on which to assess the candidate and ask you what about those? I'd also point to the companies that put a candidate alone in a room with the test and wait for the candidate to finish, again dismissing the candidate if they don't produce an answer that matches.

EliRivers 7y ago
Full disclosure; I screwed up one of those enormously several years ago when I just couldn't remember the C++ std function for turning a string into an int. Was it toString? tostring? stringify? No, that's crazy, none of the std has "ify" on the end. I must be thinking of some other framework I used once. What about intToString? No, that can't be it. itos? itoa? That's not standard. They've given me locked down web access to a C++ reference (and nothing else), I can just use that. WTF - this isn't cppreference.com. I suppose I could open up the header and ... oh, it includes a bunch more headers, and string of course is itself really basic_string<char> so I'm going to be searching through a lot of template... Suffice to say I was looking for to_string, and what I did was blow through too much of my time trying to remember this, and writing my own function to do it instead, which worked fine, but then I ran out of time and didn't finish all the tasks in the time permitted. For want of remembering to_string.

blunte 7y ago

I wouldn't believe you, unless you qualified it by saying "some coding tests". What you describe is how they should be, imo. But it's absolutely not what I have experienced.