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Something that bothers me: Most of these tests are looking for the same things, so why do I have to take the test for each company I apply for? It strikes me th
by Youden 7y ago
Something that bothers me: Most of these tests are looking for the same things, so why do I have to take the test for each company I apply for? It strikes me that this is a similar problem to getting into university and for that there are standardized tests.
Why can't we introduce a standardized coding skills exam where everyone is given the same problems and the same amount of time to solve them? The whole industry can collaborate and learn from each other to make a single test that gives the best hiring signal.
I'm under no illusion that such a thing would be trivial to do but it seems feasible. You get rid of the resume check, replace the recruiter call with a first-stage multiple choice exam that gates the rest of the process and replace the coding interview with a long-form exam with open questions. The long-form exams can be graded by the engineers that would otherwise be doing interviews but distributed amongst all the companies involved.
Once you've got all the technical stuff out of the way, you can do a single onsite interview for culture fit.
Seems like this is a win for everyone. Candidates can do the coding portion once instead of say 5 times, those 5 companies only have to evaluate a fifth of the candidates' exams (since the grading is shared amongst them) and you no longer have the problem of each candidate getting a completely different process to every other candidate.
- lbotos 7y agoThere is a YC company that is trying to do this: https://triplebyte.com/ https://triplebyte.com/ Search for stories about it on HN to see how it's going.
- ldoughty 7y agoBecause then people will cheat and have a friend do the test for you. I have people pretending to have certifications they don't have.. or actually having the certification but somehow can't answer non obscure facts... (How can you be AWS solution architect, verified certificate, but not know that the general purpose EC2 instances is... Or what AWS service provides script execution in languages like python or node? And what service they provide for logging? I had a candidate that failed all 3 questions... My only thought is someone took the exam for him... Other than that, there is teaching to the test. You can easily argue that's what happens now, and most systems suffer for it. People learn concepts they are required to, but rarely good application of those concepts because they only have 90 minutes to cover a large topic like composition vs inheritance. You get one or two examples about animals barking and cars. Good luck figuring out how to apply that to business topics!
- Youden 7y ago> Because then people will cheat and have a friend do the test for you. Isn't this problem shared by all exams? How often do people successfully cheat on their university/college entrance exams? And hell, can't you potentially do this with a technical interview? Nobody who interviewed you is actually going to see you again and I don't recall an ID check at any of my interviews. > Other than that, there is teaching to the test. You can easily argue that's what happens now, and most systems suffer for it. Exactly, we already have "cracking the coding interview" and similar tools. I think this approach would be better because the questions can always be prepared for a particular year's interview from scratch, so there's no chance they've been seen before.
- Izkata 7y ago> And hell, can't you potentially do this with a technical interview? Nobody who interviewed you is actually going to see you again and I don't recall an ID check at any of my interviews. I don't think this is reliable. One of my interviewers became my manager; we make it a point to hire for a specific team and get someone on that team in the interview.