4 ms·

I turned down an offer from a direct competitor company because they tried to funnel me through an automated programming "test". I told them I have years of exp

I turned down an offer from a direct competitor company because they tried to funnel me through an automated programming "test". I told them I have years of experience at their competing company whose hiring bar is notoriously high, and they still demanded I take their weird test. The company was Goldman Sachs. Name and shame.

pandaman 6y ago
I had similar experience with Facebook, not directly competing as they are just expanding into my area of expertise, but they had been looking to poach. The recruiter told me that the first step will be a test to determine if I can program so I told them I am not interested without even trying to negotiate out of it.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  > a test to determine if I can program so I told them I am not interested It seems you don't enjoy coding?
  - pandaman 6y ago
    No, not writing code per se.
GordonS 6y ago
You need to try to see it from the hirer's perspective too. I don't interview much these days, but I spent several years of my career sifting through CVs and interviewing candidates. The number of candidates with seemingly impressive CVs and apparent several years of experience, yet whom basically couldn't code, was shockingly high. And when I say "couldn't code", I'm talking "couldn't even fizz-buzz" levels of incompetence. The fact is that there are many devs out there who coast through jobs, while all the time it's their colleagues who are doing all the work. I wasted, many, many hours of my life before realising that it was pointless interviewing candidates that couldn't code - asking them to perform a sort of gatekeeper test improved things immensely. So it might seem insulting to have to perform these entry tests, but unless you already have code publicly available (e.g. on GitHub), you shouldn't take it personally.

4 ms·

I turned down an offer from a direct competitor company because they tried to funnel me through an automated programming "test". I told them I have years of exp

by wildrhythms 6y ago

pandaman 6y ago
I had similar experience with Facebook, not directly competing as they are just expanding into my area of expertise, but they had been looking to poach. The recruiter told me that the first step will be a test to determine if I can program so I told them I am not interested without even trying to negotiate out of it.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  > a test to determine if I can program so I told them I am not interested It seems you don't enjoy coding?
  - pandaman 6y ago
    No, not writing code per se.
GordonS 6y ago
You need to try to see it from the hirer's perspective too. I don't interview much these days, but I spent several years of my career sifting through CVs and interviewing candidates. The number of candidates with seemingly impressive CVs and apparent several years of experience, yet whom basically couldn't code, was shockingly high. And when I say "couldn't code", I'm talking "couldn't even fizz-buzz" levels of incompetence. The fact is that there are many devs out there who coast through jobs, while all the time it's their colleagues who are doing all the work. I wasted, many, many hours of my life before realising that it was pointless interviewing candidates that couldn't code - asking them to perform a sort of gatekeeper test improved things immensely. So it might seem insulting to have to perform these entry tests, but unless you already have code publicly available (e.g. on GitHub), you shouldn't take it personally.