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I don’t have time for coding challenges

• jariel 6y ago
  Crossing concerns here: Assignments can be helpful, but they can also be time consuming which is unfair. Do the code or whiteboard 'on the day' - enough with the take home tests, or, pay people to do the tests.
• edoceo 6y ago
  This sentiment is too real. And too many folks in "charge" of hiring play this game. When I'm hiring, I give applicants a real-code task, something they'd really do if they were hired - and I pay for their time too. This method has allowed me to skip a lot of time-suck-bullshit while finding candidates, and their process with me is easier/faster too.
  • ericskiff 6y ago
    Agreed. We use a coding challenge that mimics the type of work we do, and we pay people for their time. We talk through their solutions and get a good sense for their ability to focus, follow written user stories / specs, and their familiarity with common tools. We also get a feel for how well they can talk about their work and the product. We see a strong correlation between performance on this task and performance and happiness when working with us. The other important point is that this is very similar to the work we do and the way we generally do it. If someone doesn't like or want to get paid to do this task, they're likely not going to be happy doing it every day if they get the job.
  • syspec 6y ago
    > When I'm hiring, I give applicants a real-code task, something they'd really do if they were hired - and I pay for their time too. Most real code task require a lot of ramp up time to gain context.
• hello_asdf 6y ago
  I disagree with the author. A coding challenge is a good way to judge how a candidate approaches a problem. The ability to walk through what you’re thinking while you’re doing it is a great judge of ability. It also helps to weed out people who can’t actually program, this comes up annoyingly often. I agree that having intentional errors in a starter repository is bad though.
  • dylan604 6y ago
    You can also have a discussion one how one would approach the problem vs actually doing the coding. The discussion alone would give great insight into how the applicant understands the whole concept, and any potential pitfalls that can be anticipated, etc.
• ergocoder 6y ago
  Then, don't. I want to move from my 2000 USD a month (this is a good salary already) in a 3rd world country to a FAANG that pays 20k USD per month. I'm willing to go through any challenge because the reward is superb for me. Not to mention, without objective interview questions, an introverted non-native English speaker (who doesn't speak latin-germanic-based language) like me would fail most of these subjective questions (e.g. bad culture fit, can't articulate as well as a native speaker). I like coding challenges. Please do more.
  • geebee 6y ago
    That's why people do it, no doubt. Keep in mind, a lot of these questions are asked by vastly less desirable companies that ape the hiring practices of FAANG, even though they pay much less. And these companies complain bitterly about a shortage of good developers to hire. So... I'm all onboard with your statement, but I think you only said half of it. Nobody owes me a job, and if I don't like it, I'm free to not get hired. Nobody owes a company an employee either, and if candidates don't don't like it, the company is free to not hire. Zero sympathy for companies that do this and complain about a shortage of candidates.
    • bdcravens 6y ago
      > a lot of these questions are asked by vastly less desirable companies that ape the hiring practices of FAANG, even though they pay much less I was asked to do a coding exercise for a tiny ($2500 if memory is correct) freelance project.
    • luckylion 6y ago
      Do only those companies complain about a shortage of candidates? Because in the tech centers I know, the market is just empty. Lots of large companies are competing for talent, and if you can't pay bank salaries, you're going to have a hard time. You make it sound like there's plenty of talent around but companies are being snobbish. That's not my experience at all in Germany.
      • geebee 6y ago
• syspec 6y ago
  The proposed solution to me, is much worse. > Ask them to build something – anything! > Instead of a coding challenge, ask them to spend a short time building something they enjoy, and talk about what they did and why. To me this would be a MUCH more difficult task. A blank canvas is much harder to work with, and downright frightening. Constraints foster creativity. Having everyone code the same thing helps the interviewer (who is also very busy and has many other things happening in their work life) gauge the different levels of the people applying easily by comparing them on the same task.
  • cosmotic 6y ago
    The difference is the interviewer is being paid for their time, the interviewee is not.
    • ithkuil 6y ago
      Then pay the candidate! It might seem ridiculous but consider how much time is spent by interviewers, hiring committees etc, giving some fraction of that out even to utterly worthless candidates might not be the worst idea in the world. A side effect of this is that suddenly the cost of a bad screening becomes more intuitive
      • ma2rten 6y ago
        That would create the wrong incentives.
        • justaguy88 6y ago
          "What do you do for work?" "Oh I just interview a lot, the pay isn't amazing but it is what it is"
    • nhooyr 6y ago
      That's a problem with the company. We at @cdr pay interviewee's $200 for their take home challenges.
• pknerd 6y ago
  I got chance to appear in a couple of coding challenges while applied for jobs. In one test I failed. It was a typical hacker rank riddle. The other I passed as I see my test ran properly yet I got a rejection letter. Another HN based job interview I was asked for a challenge but I simply refused.
• lxe 6y ago
  > Have a probationary period That seems very taxing on the company. I'd rather screen the candidate before committing to anything via interview/coding challenge, etc... The take-home coding challenge seems like a good idea -- less pressure than coding during the interview and allows the interviewer to assess the "real life" performance. > Ask them to build something – anything! That's great, but a big part of working at a company is building something that you don't like or don't understand well -- talking to stakeholders, customers, figuring out specs, etc -- something that a good take-home exercise can assess
  • Nbox9 6y ago
    The probationary period seems incredibly stressful for the employee. If I am currently employed I would never switch to a role that uses a probationary period as a significant evaluation step because of the risks of leaving my stable employment, and not passing your probationary period. As an employer I wouldn’t want to limit my selection to people that either are unemployed or have a higher personal risk tolerance to handle such situations.
    • Lt_Riza_Hawkeye 6y ago
      Exactly. Not to mention younger engineers will probably work 24/7 for 12 weeks while constantly worrying they could be fired tomorrow because they didn't fix some bug fast enough.
      • ryandrake 6y ago
        Not to mention it eliminates anyone who already has a job from the candidate pool. No company I know would be OK with you also working full time at another company simultaneously.
  • shock 6y ago
    > That seems very taxing on the company. I'd rather screen the candidate before committing to anything via interview/coding challenge So having a probationary period is too expensive for the company, but a several hours coding challenge for the developer is a OK? In my experience when a candidate was a bad fit, it was because of soft skills/personality traits not technical chops (which are much easier to learn than soft skills). Are you screening for soft skills in the coding challenge?
• wrnr 6y ago
  I freelance, and if asked to do a coding test I'll tell them to pay for my time, usually they drop the test and contract me right away.
• aantix 6y ago
  It's a tough problem, but eventually you have to demonstrate some sort of competency. White board, open source contributions, homework. There has to be some way of demonstrating you know what you are doing. I'm a consultant so I've been through tons of interviews at this point in my career (21+ years). If I had my choice? I'd pair program with my potential teammates on a bug/feature for the product I'd be working on. Give me something real that's been in the backlog for a while, and we'll pair on it for the allotted time.
  • avrionov 6y ago
    This sounds good, but it will not work for many jobs. Fixing a bug in a code base that you don't recognize is more difficult that a well defined coding problem. Candidates will be limited to the technologies and problems which they are already familiar. This approach has some value, but it can't be the only way to evaluate candidates.
• not_real_acct 6y ago
  Time is money. If you make about $100 an hour, a six hour coding challenge costs you about $600. If a potential employer asked you to spend $600 to fly out and see them, on your dime, would you do it? I would do it IF I desperately needed a job. I did it back during the dot com crash; I needed a job badly and I was willing to roll the dice. In 2020? Oh hell no. There's a million companies who are hiring, and an employer would have to be exceptionally special for me to waste $600 on the chance they'll hire me.
  • autarch 6y ago
    Companies fly people out all the time (well, pre-COVID). They pay for the travel expenses, but not your time. I personally find this much more of an imposition than spending a few hours writing some code in the comfort of my home.
  • djsumdog 6y ago
    The only time I've bothered with coding challenges is what I was out of work, and zero of them, even some I spent hours working on, have ever lead me to a job. My current employer was fine with an example from current open source project I contribute to.
• dhairya 6y ago
  I agree that code challenges aren't ideal. But we've been struggling with parsing resumes and titles to identify the competency of developers. Our current coding challenge isn't super hard and based on the type of code you'd see in our product. It asks you to read a simple javascript function, explain it, and then implement new functionality that can built by refactoring the existing method. It's about 20 lines of code and 50 lines of documentation. You can use any IDE that you like. We've had many candidates that look strong on paper (3+ years of experience, senior titles, etc) come in and struggle. Struggles ranged from basic code literacy (think for loop to traverse a nested json object) to basic programming like writing a function. We've especially noticed this more with coders coming from purely a javascript and front-end background (React/Angular, etc). They understand control structures like if/else but struggle with loops, setting variables, and basic higher level concepts like breaking a problem into smaller functions. My philosophy is for junior candidates, any level of competency is ok. Strong mentoring and experience on job usually can allow anyone to thrive and so you can prioritize soft skills and culture. But for more advanced roles, I don't know, it's hard to parse out the quality candidates without having some sort of technical interview. Definitely would love to hear how other's learning and experiences.
  • dhairya 6y ago
    Another we'd love to hear opinions on. Based on a recent study where candidates are more likely to succeed if given private space and time to work on the problem, we'll disclose the coding challenge about 15 minutes prior to the interview allow the candidate to read it before joining the call. We struggle with the right amount of time provided for private review is. We want to be fair to all candidates and not implicitly favor candidates who have more free time to dedicate to the interview process than others. but at same time provide some sort of reflection space outside of a cold start to the challenge.
  • geebee 6y ago
    I've heard a variant of this repeatedly. A company justifies technical exam style interviews on the grounds that many people who look good on paper "can't code". Meaning, can't program fizz buzz. Can't write a method or function. Can't write a loop, or an if/else conditional. But I can do all these things. I've gotten bounced from my interviews because (this was the official reason, anyway) I didn't get far enough with the coding in finding all matching subtrees in a binary tree, in 45 minutes, at the whiteboard. Companies should feel free to hire based on my ability to do this, they should not say they were just testing basic things like lists, loops, and conditionals, or even basic data structures and algorithms like binary trees or hash maps. These exams go way beyond that. This may not be the case for all, and it sounds like it is not the case for your process. But in the broader industry practice, I smell a motte-and-bailey fallacy here.
• shock 6y ago
  I think one can be creative about it. Applying the principle "nobody wants to buy a 2 inch drill bit; what they want is a 2 inch round hole", the people in the company do not want to give you a coding test, they want to hire a competent candidate. So convince them you are competent for the job in other ways if you do not want to spend the time doing the coding challenge. One way of going about about it is to find former colleagues that work for the company you are applying to, and ask them to provide references on your behalf.
• SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  Many of the author's suggested alternatives clearly fail on the stated reasons why coding challenges are bad. Asking pertinent questions is clearly arbitrary; probationary periods are non-inclusive to candidates who are relocating or need a visa; asking candidates to "build something - anything" would be substantially more time consuming for engineers in many specialties. (How am I supposed to build a small demo app to show off my systems programming ability?) It's hard for me to escape the conclusion that the author's just trying to universalize their personal preferences.
• cosmotic 6y ago
  I've done 5 coding challenges, I deemed each one a success on my end, none resulted in a job. A few resulted in a third interview which revealed numerous additional red flags. At this point I consider a coding challenge a deal breaker. I'm not doing one, and if you ask, there's a near certain chance I wouldn't want to work in an environment that thinks they are a good idea. If you're interested in my abilities, I'd be happy to spend an hour walking through something I've already worked on in the past.
• bdcravens 6y ago
  What other industries do something similar in their hiring process?
  • andy99 6y ago
    A family member is a chef, and for new jobs you have to "stage" [0] where you come and cook for a (unpaid) shift to see if you are a fit, have the skills, etc. To me this is exactly the same thing, and I expect this is very common across different kinds of jobs. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stage_(cooking) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stage_(cooking)
• hpen 6y ago
  Without having a degree, I feel coding challenges are the only way I can truly compete.
• 52-6F-62 6y ago
  I'm of the opinion that if there needs to be some objective technical challenge to determine a baseline of competency (and there are very many, very strong arguments for that) then there need to be standards. I've encountered so many variables (no pun intended) in technical interviews that I've virtually stopped preparing. There's hardly any way to prepare when the field is so large and you never really know what you're going to be tested on. I've had people challenge me on theoretical system-time timezone conversions (and incorrectly mark my correct answer wrong "because of physics"...), beside reimplementing native JavaScript functions, beside complex algorithmic problems, beside toy problems like building a binary calculator. [That's great if you learn I can rig a web page for adding 100 and 101, but how do you know if I know anything about databases for this back end position] And those interviews were all for working with web tech, in a couple of the cases just front end positions. There needs to be a common, limited standard and/or domain-specific standards. It's really counter-intuitive to me, and I don't understand how it benefits the hiring process, if a company is looking for a web-back-end engineer for what is essentially a complex crud app and wants to propose the candidate solves a problem from a domain they've never worked in—and marking them on the correctness of the answer, rather than the work process. I'm for objective, technical challenges. But I've seen enough that it seems apparent to me that it's broken. (addendum: I've had several good interviews as well, and good interviewers. I had a good one recently as well that was fitting for the domain. They're not all bad, but most seem to be in my experience)
  • frequentnapper 6y ago
    the FAANG interviews are pretty standardized now - but then that only selects candidates who are well prepped for the interview itself.
    • leesec 6y ago
      They're really not. It becomes a cat and mouse game where the interviewers know which pool of questions people are studying so they try to invent new ones to prevent people just memorizing the answers. The questions thus end up becoming more and more obscure.
• djsumdog 6y ago
  I usually tell interviewers I don't do per-interview assignments. I'll often e-mail them a list of current open source taks I'm working on, a paragraph with good requirements or a linked issue from an issue tracker. I'll list the programing language and framework and ask them to select from the list. I'll complete my task, with tests, and do a full presentation. Universally I get turned down. "You have to do our assignment." Oh and I'll usually offer to do their assignment for $300. That doesn't go well either. Only one company took me up on this offer, and it's the one I work for. (They didn't even ask me to complete one of my tasks, they just looked at the project I authored and said that was fine; and scheduled a full interview). The few times I have actually done these assignments, I've never gotten the job.
  • wendyshu 6y ago
    Their loss.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• user5994461 6y ago
  Funny how he starts saying he never had a whiteboard interview and he never gave an interview, yet he has such strong opinions on everything that's wrong with it. edit: read to the end, a lot of the points are absurd, easy to realize after a couple interviews.
• thelazydogsback 6y ago
  As someone who has been programming for 40 years and had a decently successful career but is struggling with these challenges now, I can empathize. It's not so much what the challenge is -- it's how one is asked to accomplish it. Sitting in front of my laptop for 6 hours while people ask me random programming tasks while they watch me on camera and see every keystroke on screen while I'm editing is not how I work. I work by choosing from active tasks that fit the "space" I'm in, by multi-tasking, etc. - if I get stuck on something in the "real world" I'll go work on something else that needs to get done, etc. You'd be amazed at how many interviewers simply refuse to ask you another question in lieu of or even in addition to the one the first wanted to ask, for example.
• nihil75 6y ago
  Yea, it's meant to be a waste of your time. More accurately, if you need to learn new things to complete it - it will be very time consuming. Someone experienced, or that uses relevant tech/skills on a daily basis should complete it in less than the time allotted. Therefore "homework" coding challenges are useful for discerning if a candidate has relevant, current experience. See the article on college professor solving a 30+ of CS problems in one day. Whiteboard challenges, on the other hand, evaluate a candidates thinking process & presentation skills. Whiteboard challenges
• dataminded 6y ago
  I require them because candidates lie, not always intentionally. The unfortunate reality is that it can be really tough to fire low-performers. I NEED to know that a candidate can do the work. We go out of our way to make our ask reasonable, relevant to the role, not spec-work, not time consuming, and well defined. It's not uncommon for us to learn that the candidate can't actually do what their resume says they can or for the candidate to learn that they grossly overestimate their own skills. I recently talked to a Python/JS expert that led a project at a major agency to scrape a network of websites, find and extract specific data, and deliver game changing competitive intelligence. The candidate ended up admitting that their role was limited to copying and pasting a pre-built code snippet into the dev tools console and that they couldn't actually read or write any code. The proof is in the coding challenge.
  • coffeefirst 6y ago
    I find these people reveal themselves almost immediately when we start talking about their projects in any depth.
• mden 6y ago
  Most of the alternate approaches have their own severe failings: Ask pertinent questions - a lot of candidates are bad at immediate summation and dissemination of information. There are many good engineers who have not learned how to sell their work, themselves, or in general communicate to the intent of a question. This is an invaluable skill, largely orthogonal to writing code, but it's a skill that's often learned with experience. Learning to ask level appropriate questions is hard and evaluating answers consistently (if not objectively) even harder. It is also largely insufficient in gauging programming ability. I've had co-workers who can talk about advanced architecture-y topics seemingly competently but struggle to write even relatively simple code. Probationary period - I've never seen this implemented (excluding internships which sort of fall into this category) and it certainly sounds like a nice option to have available but I would bet many candidates would be afraid of a short probationary period (say 3 mo) especially if they have to move their family for the job. Being a professional and being told you are on a probationary period is stressful. At many large companies it can easily take more than 6wks to get up to any sort of productivity. Walk through existing projects - most people (vast majority) do not have any sizable or clean or even "interesting" side project they would want to walk an interviewer through. Unless you worked on open-source for your previous employer (again minority of people) or on your spare time, this is not something you can get a strong signal out of. Ask them to build something - err, I don't see how this is that different than a coding challenge. And again, not everyone has personal projects ready to be shown to an interviewer. For example, the game I'm coding some nights after work does not look anything like code I write for my employer; there are no tests, there's a lot of experimental and often dead code, functions are not neatly factored and thought out with an eye for collaboration, etc. I would not want to be judged by this code for an interview. Pair programming - this sounds like a coding challenge but with a more empathetic interviewer. I don't think this is an alternative, just a mild augmentation of a coding challenge. Focus on ability to learn - companies do this but it's usually considered supplementary to coding ability. Some companies explain their product and try to see if the candidate understands where the value of the product exists or at least where some of the challenges are. This could be spun out into a product type interview or a system design interview depending on intent. Alternatives to white-boarding or do-at-home project interviews: - Provide a small existing but functional code base and ask the candidate to implement additional functionality. Downside is this takes a lot more effort to prepare and are limiting the candidate in regards to language they want to use. - Provide multiple options for a coding project or question and let the candidate choose which one they want to solve. This would hopefully reduce some of the luck factor of getting a question you know how to solve. - I can't think of any others, but I'm sure they exist One of the big desirable goals of interviews are evaluating candidates in a consistent manner. All interviewers have biases and these biases vary between the interviewers. Trying to account for that is, I believe, important but also very hard. Using the proposed alternatives would make it even much harder.
• autarch 6y ago
  > "I’m writing this as an interviewee, having never been on the other side of the interview table ..." > ... > "Most candidates will have side-projects or work they’ve done for previous employers." As someone who has actually done a lot of interviewing, I can say with great confidence that this is simply wrong. At my current employer, we have a "homework assignment" as part of the interview process. We tell candidates that they can point us at an existing project of theirs instead of doing the homework. Few people take us up on this because few applicants have any substantial public side projects or FOSS work they can share. And sharing "work they've done for previous employers" is a great way to court legal trouble. They shouldn't share it and as an interviewer I don't want to see it!
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • nogabebop23 6y ago
    We use a coding challenge as well but I like your addition of "auditing" the coding part and using existing open source or side project work. Bonus points if it uses some of the target technologies too! The author doesn't appear to understand the economics of the hiring company; it's about time & effort to filter and the cost of making a bad hire. I cannot give every application 1-2 hours of review if I get 100+ resumes. I can't give every interviewee a half-day assessment to get the very poor signal/noise ratio answers to questioning methods suggested. I can't hire easy and then fire easy. I can't invest weeks of work from myself and other mentors on non-ideal potentials. I know this means I pass over great candidates and that really sucks and is totally unfair. I'm sure that's happended to me as well. The problem is nothing presented here is a better alternative.
    • _qulr 6y ago
      > I cannot give every application 1-2 hours of review if I get 100+ resumes. This is perhaps the biggest misconception of hiring, that out of some misguided notion of "fairness" or "objectivity" you have to treat every candidate exactly the same. In theory it seems like a good principle, but the road to hell is paved in good intentions. In practice, this results in arbitrarily designed standard tests which are only superficially fair, and systematically weed out people who aren't good at test taking or auditions. Go through all the resumes quickly, pick out the top candidates, and start from the top! Focus most of your time on researching your few top candidates, and if one of them seems good, then hire them, and end your hiring process. You may only have to interview 1, 2, maybe 3 people at most. This saves everyone time: your own time, and the time of the 100+ people who would otherwise be interviewed and rejected, because there's only 1 job opening. Obviously if you interview your top candidates, and you find them lacking, then keep working your way down the stack. But going through the entire stack of candidates is a huge waste of time, a pointless exercise, totally counterproductive. Don't do "screening" interviews. Only do "hiring" interviews.
• andrewstuart 6y ago
  Recruiting is mostly about finding reasons to say no. And nothing gives more open ended reasons than the coding test.
• soneca 6y ago
  I think the best hiring process would give the candidate options. Choose among pair-programming a live coding challenge or a new feature creation, whiteboard, take-home coding challenges, or going through some open-source project from the candidate. I happen to prefer take-home challenges more than any of the alternatives. It’s much less stressful than any live assessment. And I have the time. But I understand people that hate it. You evaluate the candidate how they think they are best evaluated. And I don’t think it is that much more trouble or time investment by the company.
• simplyinfinity 6y ago
  I'm currently in the interview process with few companies, here's my experience with them: Company 1: 1 hour HR interview Coding task spend about 4 hours on it, at first i implemented basic but correct implementation, no OOD & design patters or anything fancy. They said i should redo it but with SOLID OOD and design patterns + unit tests, so i threw in the most convoluted code i could think of for a console app. That did the job and got to the next part. 3 hour technical interview, ~2 hours of HR talk & getting to know me, then a set of 5 algorithms tasks. I failed at some point, as i'm not fan of algorithms tasks and i don't have CS education, so my algorithms knowledge isn't strong. Result : Not qualified enough no offer Company 2: 1 hour HR interview After which they sent me a task that would have taken me about 8-10 hours to do. I politely Declined. Company 3: 1 HR interview 2 x 1hr technical interviews, First technical interview : extend a very very simple code (2-3 classes) with couple of functionalities and write tests. All in all it took an hour and was pretty straightforward. With no hidden gotchas Second technical interview : you are given task details, and have 20 minutes to come up with overall system design. after which we spend about 30 minutes going trough that and asking why i choose X or Y, or what if the requirements changed to X or Y. then 1 hour final "culture fit" interview. Result: waiting for offer. Company 4: 2 x 1 hour interviews with the CTO & CEO. Tech talk mostly, but no deep algo questions. What challenges I've had and how I've solved them. Result : waiting for offer. Company 5: one 1 hour HR interview, and i have to do a 5 hours long fixed time (i.e. they sent tasks at 12:00 i have to be done by 5 and send results). And i'm debating if i should do it at all. I've had the most pleasant experience with companies 3 & 4. From their HR staff to their Interviewers. About about me for context: I'm a backend/full stack engineer with about 10 years of experience. I've coded professionally in PHP, C# and JavaScript. I've led few interviews, but never used spend-a-day-doing-it code challenges.
  • Kuraj 6y ago
    Company 3 is very close to the interview process that led me to my current job. They also gave me a choice between a "waterfall" approach, or pair programming where we talk about the solution as we go. Most pleasant interview experience I've ever had.
• TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  I would never work somewhere that didn't make me write code as part of the interview process. I don't want to work with people who are good at bullshitting their way through interviews, but can't actually write code.
  • wool_gather 6y ago
    This is definitely something to consider. I actually once turned down an offer because I thought their process was too perfunctory. (Along with some other signs.) I didn't like what it implied about how they saw me as an employee/resource nor what it implied about my potential teammates. (And since the process was so minimal I also didn't get much chance to vet the team/working environment.)
• Tade0 6y ago
  Ugh, so many points I would like to address, but can't without turning this into a lengthy essay. Anyway I'm currently interviewing and have been on both sides of the recruitment process. I don't mind homework, but I know that more often than not it's never read or taken into account. I discovered this by accident when I published my solution through a service that sends a notification when somebody downloads. Eventually they did, but only after I passed all the other steps - even though the task was given early in the process. I've been publishing them like this ever since and this is my experience so far. So yeah, coding challenges apparently are just a way to gauge your level of commitment, not a way to test your skills. Personally I'm turning this around by asking to see a piece of code before we discuss compensation in detail. Dodged at least one bullet this way.
• ausjke 6y ago
  Don't know what to say, but I think this is one way to iron out senior folks who don't do daily coding and most of the time was on designing, diagnosis or debugging. When you go to interview,you may be interviewed by a fresh graduate who throw you a trick leetcode question that is, pretty much, requiring you come up with code in 30 minutes. Without a few months careful practice, it's hard to get it right under stress. Coding challenges are like driving, you drive at normal speed in real life so you can drive everyday safely, but for interview, your brain has to be speed up the max speed under pressure, not everyone, not even the brightest guy who can do this well, again without months preparation. I got interviews at Amazon etc but I never had time to practice leetcode etc, there is no way I can pass its whiteboard process without at least 3 months preparation I feel, and I absolutely have no time for that. How about hiring senior folks as a contractor for 1 or 2 months then to decide the level and pay and such? nobody wastes anytime and no obligation either.
• jasoneckert 6y ago
  Hiring a bad developer can be a costly mistake. In addition to the costs for the developer, there are often other costs and productivity lost. Basically a good coder is not the same as a good developer. Coding is relatively easy - if you can visualize and solve problems using code, then you're a good developer. It's the thought process that makes you a good developer. Coding challenges are often a good way to test this thought process. I often require candidates walk me through their code and explain their reasoning behind everything to see if they'll be valuable on my team. However, coding challenges are just one way to ascertain someone's thought process. Watching people work on code during a game jam or hackathon often gives me an idea of their thought process, as does the advice of other people I trust who vouch for them. So, no - coding challenges aren't always necessary. But unless there is a better way for me to learn whether you're going to be a good developer, then I'll give you one.
  • capkutay 6y ago
    The author's suggestion of a 'trial period' of employment might also be one of the impractical, costly, infeasible ideas I've ever seen proposed. So the candidate doesn't want to spend 1 hour on a coding interview because 'they don't have time.' The solution? Spend a month on-boarding the candidate to your company (taking time from multiple team members), give them an implicitly high stakes work project while they get used to the new working environment and production codebase. Meanwhile there's tension/friction because the company wants to quickly validate the temporary hire. If it's successful, okay proceed as an employee. If it's unsuccessful, it's a huge waste of everyone's time, a costly experiment for the company/team, and likely a very unpleasant 6 week long working engagement. Then the candidate will have to explain why they only lasted at their previous employer for 6 weeks in their next set of interviews.
    • dvtrn 6y ago
      The author's suggestion of a 'trial period' of employment might also be one of the impractical, costly, infeasible ideas I've ever seen proposed. Then the world of 1099 IT “technician staffing” and ‘contingency technical recruiting’ will absolutely horrify you because an entire cottage industry unto itself is built around this employment model. It’s especially popular in call-center workforce management.
• hnrodey 6y ago
  so much complaining
• JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
  Instead of a data structure and algorithms problem, give someone a broken webpack and/or babel configs and 30 minutes to figure it out. Will let you know if they understand bundlers and transpilers, which is probably more useful than an esoteric tree traversal question, at least with respect to front-end engineering.
• secondcoming 6y ago
  I've been on both sides of the interview process and I don't agree. If you were a chef applying for job it wouldn't be unreasonable if an interviewer actually asked you to cook something (one famous chef would ask candidates to fry an egg). I do, however, not expect any candidate to do anything we haven't had to write ourselves. I also let them look up Google/StackOverflow etc during the interview. They're also offered a beer but nobody ever takes me up on that.
• JackC 6y ago
  I like the coding challenge we designed for hiring where I work. A few things about it that work: - It's designed to take about the same time as the round of interviews it replaces (half a day), and we clearly communicate how polished and complete we're expecting it to (not) be in that time. - It's a lot like the actual work; if you enjoy it / are good at it, there's a good chance you'll enjoy / be good at the job. It helps make sure (on both sides) that the job is a good fit. - But at the same time it's designed to be obviously not actually work we're going to use; we're not exploiting unpaid labor. - There aren't gotchas to it. We review it with an eye toward "if my coworker showed me something they'd been working on for about this long to address this problem statement, how would I feel about their work," and do our best to express that. - The rest of the application process takes the challenge into account in a positive way. I might have a conversation with you later to understand how you think about the problem you solved, but none of the interviews have to be gotchas or on-the-fly skills tests because I've already seen the kind of work you do. - Everyone takes the same challenge, and it feels way more fair to discuss candidates based on reviewing how they do the kind of work that we do, compared to "X person has a cool open source repo; Y person gave a good interview answer to this technical question; Z person worked at an interesting place in the past." There's still some apples to oranges in comparing coding challenges, but much less than comparing one person's bootcamp group project open source repo with another person's reason that their best code is closed source but it sounds cool. With a well-designed challenge the benefits on the hiring side are really obvious (we actually have a basis for comparing applicants that feels somewhat related to the work they're going to do), but also (I hope) we've managed to make a better process for applicants without expanding the time they're spending.
  • zebnyc 6y ago
    a) Do you compensate folks who take these challenges. Otherwise it is half a day of unpaid labor. Also most take home tests take way longer even though they are advertised as "only a couple of hours". Do you have empirical evidence that it can be completed in the given time slot? Have you given the test to your own colleagues who may not know the background / domain knowledge / environment setup required? b) Do you make it clear what you consider as "good design"? OOP/Imperative or Functional coding style? Even in OOP, is it sufficient if the candidate just does SOLID or do they have to implement GoF patterns? This is very subjective and never made clear in these tests. c) Is there a guarantee that an actual person will review the submitted code and provide feedback? AFAIK, most companies won't give candidates any feedback / validation of submitted work
• mayoff 6y ago
  You're complaining that, to get a job, you have to demonstrate your ability to do the job, in a standardized way so the employer can compare you to other candidates with the merest hint of objectivity. For a little (imperfect) contrast, here's a quote from an article about auditioning for the Baltimore Symphony: > In the audition I took in October of 2014 for the Baltimore Symphony, I began preparing the required audition list in August. http://www.bsomusicians.org/public_html/so-you-want-to-audition-for-a-professional-orchestra/ http://www.bsomusicians.org/public_html/so-you-want-to-audit...
  • lhorie 6y ago
    > so the employer can compare And why do we think this is objective? Ostensibly, the first one to clear some threshold of competence ought to be good enough to be hired (in fact there's even extensively studied algorithms[1] for this stuff). In the vast majority of cases, it's highly unlikely that you're going to find an underpriced genius via some misguided notion of test standardization. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
    • username90 6y ago
      Big companies aren't looking for underpriced geniuses. Standardized hiring is like index funds, many argue they can get better results by hand picking stocks but index funds still tend to outperform managed investing unless you are really really good at it. In a big company the people doing the hiring will be mediocre at it, so you need a process they wont screw up.
    • mayoff 6y ago
      I think it's objective because I can weed out candidates based solely on objective questions about their solution to the coding problem. Of course there's still lots of subjectivity in the process, but I did say “the merest hint of objectivity”. Here's my real world case study. I wrote a programming problem for RGM Advisors. The company was sold and so its web site no longer exists. Here's someone's solution to that problem: https://github.com/perrye2/LimitOrderBook https://github.com/perrye2/LimitOrderBook My original problem statement is in the PDF in that repo. Here are some of the objective ways we evaluated submissions: - Does the submission parse/compile? - Does the submission run and not crash? - Does the submission follow the specification for how it should be invoked? - Does the submission produce the correct output? - Did the candidate submit answers to the time/space complexity questions given in the problem statement? - Do those answers correctly characterize the submission?
• joeax 6y ago
  I've been on both sides of the table and I'll tell you a coding challenge is a much better solution than the whiteboard/leetcode/code-on-the-fly during the interview. Just keep it short i.e. 2-4 hours max. As far as alternatives to a coding challenge, the OP did suggest walking through a prior project on GitHub. I think that's a great idea (in addition to a coding challenge though); an open source project on GitHub is a bonus for a candidate, and will in many cases steer the interviewer to ask questions about your project in lieu of abstract concepts.
• ipnon 6y ago
  The prevailing opinion in this thread is that coding challenges are fair and equitable. HN was singing a different tune on the same subject just a few months ago. What changed? The economy collapsed. The labor market is no longer in favor of those selling their time and energy. So perceptions of this practice have changed.
• opportune 6y ago
  This person has admittedly never even done a whiteboard interview or given an interview. Why are we upvoting this drivel to the front page? Boohoo, you have to spend a couple hours proving you know data structures to get a new job. Give me a break.
  • zebnyc 6y ago
    Let us assume a random candidate Mary who is batting at 20%, i.e., she passes to the next stage on every 5th attempt. Now if we follow the typical interview loop a) Take home test b) Phone screen c) Onsite d) Offer How many take home tests does Mary have to take to get 1 offer? The answer is 125 and if each is 2 hours then 250 hours. So a single test in isolation may not seem like a big deal but if every company had their own criteria and take home exams as a pre-qualifier, the candidate would face a uphill battle to find work.
    • opportune 6y ago
      I mean, my takeaway from that is that Mary is not a very good candidate, not that there is something broken with the interview process. She only needs so many interviews because she has a low success rate. Most people aren't doing nearly that many interviews in an actual job search.
    • ProZsolt 6y ago
      That's why even though I like take home tests I only willing to do them after I had the first round of technical interview. I always pass these type of test, that's why I like it at the end of the pipeline.
• dr_orpheus 6y ago
  I think that the coding challenges can be helpful if done correctly. If the challenge is clearly communicated on how complete they are expecting it to be and how it might be judged. But I did have an experience with a "homework assignment" that hit on most of the bad points outlined in the author's article. This was not specifically a coding challenge as I was applying for a Systems Engineering role at a software company. The homework assignment was basically here is a fake product, please provide a requirements spec, user manual, and test procedure associated with the product. My first problem was with the notion of doing the systems engineering backwards and creating requirements specs from a product. The second was with the conflicting communication about how much time and effort should be put in. The actual homework assignment itself said "We anticipate that this exercise should take no more than a few hours". Whereas the email I got from the recruiter said "They are looking for extreme detail here, and the ‘it should only take a few hours’ instruction is kind of BS. It’s OK if you don’t get it back for a week or so. Winning submissions from my candidates have been 7 and 11 pages long, I believe. They really want someone to go overboard with the exercise". So after putting a lot of work in (because I could, and did not have a family at the time), the only response I got was basically "Nope, you didn't get the job". And I know that employers have a lot of candidates and there is a disproportionate time spent by the employee versus the employer, but it would have been nice to at least receive 1 or 2 sentences of feedback that may have helped me in the future. To a point made by someone further down in the comments, the exercise may be a good way to judge if you would be a good fit at the company. So based on my experience I am probably glad I didn't get that job.
• ijidak 6y ago
  What I love (sarcasm) is companies that just need basic line of business apps, but want you to complete a coding challenge navigating graphs and trees in constant, nlogn time, etc. I find it hilarious and often ask, "Can you explain to me how solving this challenge applies to what you do day to day?" They say.... "That's a really good question..." Then I watch them squirm as they have no idea how to explain a real world application beyond a generic, sometimes hard problems come up... Sure... Then give me an example. I don't mind taking your test, but if your team doesn't need those skills you're wasting your time and mine by cargo-culting this time-consuming style of recruitment.
  • cyrux004 6y ago
    how about "we found a strong correlation between who can complete coding challenge do well on the job. We understand that correlation doesny imply causation; but we and the majority of the industry havent found anything better yet. We also understand that we are potentially missing out on good candidates who dont generally fare well in coding challenge; but thats a trade off we are ok with"
    • dvtrn 6y ago
      “Great, thank you for your time! I hope you find the right candidate for your team”
    • pseudalopex 6y ago
      How did you find that correlation?
      • cyrux004 6y ago
        Majority of companies including FAANG (not sure about Netflix) do these type of challenges
    • jjav 6y ago
      > how about "we found a strong correlation between who can complete coding challenge do well on the job. But that would be a lie. So not a good way to start a (potential) working relationship.
• odomojuli 6y ago
  I've been through so many puzzle dungeons that I immediately just exit a process if it involves another technical interview. I've done technical interviews with FAANG and the like and those processes actually tend to be much nicer at more mature companies because they're actually well designed problems with people who actually understand their significance. You at least get to ask questions and not just get told to jump through the hoop like a dolphin. For the rest, you end up with interviewers who google some esoteric Python problem they think is particularly clever. I'll stop here to state that I think any adherence to being overtly clever is my first and only red flag. It's so pathetically obvious because the number of times I've done the exact same problem for multiple companies because it happens to be the 2nd or 3rd search result. I once had someone disqualify my answer for using a DFA because it wasn't "real code". To be honest, I think the technical interview actually IS important, and I've had numerous experiences enjoying it if only to showcase a lot of the more necessarily toxic behaviors of a company up front. Let's be honest with ourselves, is any employer going to necessarily have the best practices with respecting your time, money and effort? It's best to lay out those cards up front. Literally every red flag will demonstrate itself through the interviewer in most scenarios. Like any test, you get out of it what you give. For example: How many times do I feel this? "We take an extra time-slot / day / email chain in what is already a hypercompetitive market just to suss you out. We wait until the last stage of the interview process to do this because we still don't totally trust you or understand anything you've done. We waste a lot of time creating elaborate puzzles that don't really matter. We're not going to pay you because our finances are already horribly mismanaged that it's complicated to contract you out for the day and also we feel like you should be gladly externalizing your labor costs for our shiny position if you really love us. Drink the kool-aid." Sometimes the technical interview surprises me. I always use it as a motivating example of myself as a candidates to work through a problem, show grit and also demonstrate when to ask for help. Ego and pride on both sides of the equation come into play and that's always a worthwhile exercise before engaging it any longterm commitment. A good test accommodates and informs through failure. I learned this from administering the Putnam. Never got a decent score on it, but it was a worthwhile experience to fail. Interview tests are on the other hand, are not designed to teach anything except that you are unworthy. My best roles have never asked for it. The company knew what they were looking for, were willing to trust me, were able to move along the interview process without losing me to a competitor and everyone was happy and they always pay competitively. Usually if there's a technical interview involved at all, they have no idea what I can actually do. If they're willing to waste time, effort and money on extra steps and are taking "necessary precautions" to subject you to what are essentially just litmus tests, then I'm sorry, that speaks to me a sense of your culture of mediocrity and dogmatic orthodoxy towards process. Goodhart's law. When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. When I was in school, we had other students take a year off to study for the Google interview. These were all affluent white men. At the same time, I had recruiters complaining to me that there were no decent black/brown candidates in the pipeline. I remember hearing the same thing except as a child. Uhhh, there's been plenty of time to invest into the local community. Recruiters would do well do understand to the history of the SAT as systemic racism, or literacy tests as systemic racism, or like any actual statistics as systemic racism. Everything that reduces candidates to numbers and quizzes feels rife for abuse. Who has the privilege to study an extra game on top of performing in a society that is already stacked against them? That's not a question. To wit, there's the issue with a large number of candidates with junk resumes. There's the outstanding issue of "authenticity" in professional acumen. There's the whole problem with the industries underlying predatory behavior with regards to labor externalization and laundering numerical metrics, be it the rate of inclusion and diversity or the amount of hours actually demanded by management. What is so fundamentally wrong with the technical interview is that it's just the cherry on top for what is already a miserable process. I'd so much rather just do free work for a potential client and just give it to them so it actually means something and is useful than waste any more time solving pointless puzzles, and this is from someone who specifically enjoyed studying hard pointless puzzles in school. No, you can't just show side projects. You should not be showing your work portfolio to anyone who isn't paying you. If they were interested in open source, they'd already be paying you. The technical interview is dead. Long live the technical interview.
• quicklime 6y ago
  > Have a probationary period As someone who's done a lot of interviews, my rule is that letting someone go during their probationary period is an absolute last resort. It'll never be used as an excuse to take risks during the interview stage - except in extreme situations, everything should be decided up front. This is purely for the benefit of the candidate. Many people quit their old jobs only after they've received an offer for a new one. Some even have to uproot their lives (and that of their families) and relocate. Firing someone during their probationary period for a preventable reason seems negligent. I'd rather put them under a bit more stress up front during the interview.
  • wendyshu 6y ago
    Why not just ask the candidate if they're willing to do a probationary period rather than deciding for them?
    • quicklime 6y ago
      I suspect the type of people I'd need to fire during their probationary period are the ones who would be desperate enough to say yes to anything during the pre-offer stage. Also, firing people isn't something I really enjoy, so even just for selfish reasons I'd rather avoid it. If it's preventable, I'd rather just get it done property at the start, rather than take these risks later. And if it got to it, HR would make my life difficult.
• KevinAiken 6y ago
  I interviewed somewhere that offered 3 options for the technical part of the interview. The options were a take home assignment, whiteboarding, and walking the interviewer through a non-proprietary project. I thought that was a great way to make the interview process more fair.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• microtherion 6y ago
  I have my own misgivings about asking interviewees to write code for interviews. But some of what the author considers weaknesses of this are actually strengths: > A disproportionate amount of time is often spent trying to deduce the requirements of the challenge. Deducing requirements is a job skill at least as valuable as the actual coding! There's nothing worse than perfectly polished code that solves entirely the wrong problem. And the author's proposed alternatives seem even worse: > Ask pertinent questions. OK, but that selects for people who can build a compelling narrative around their work. This is not the worst skill to have, but it's not entirely aligned with the actual work requirements, and subject to cultural and sometimes gender biases. > Have a probationary period I strongly dislike that. At-will employment is a reality in many places, and probationary periods are a reality in even more places, but they should be seen as a last resort, rather than a routine filter. I don't want co-workers to show up and be kicked out within a few weeks. I don't want to move 8 time zones, enroll my kids in new schools, sell my house, to be told after two weeks "Hmm, this does not seem to be working out". > Walk through their existing projects As has been mentioned numerous times on HN, that's at least as discriminatory as take-home exams, if not more so. You may spend your free time with your kids, or welding kinetic sculptures instead of programming. That's a perfectly valid choice. People who interview forensic pathologists don't expect them to cut up bodies at home in their spare time. And generally, showing existing projects from previous employment should be, and is, grounds for immediate disqualification. > Ask them to build something – anything! That strikes me as considerably harder and considerably more subjective to evaluate than a standard take home exam. > Pair program / Focus on their ability to learn That's reminiscent of one technique I used to like: Show the candidate a piece of product-like code, and ask them questions about various pieces in it (programming language constructs, algorithms used).
• rsweeney21 6y ago
  Work sample tests have been proven repeatedly to be the best predictor of future job success.[1] The next best predictor is general mental ability. It's not unreasonable to ask someone to demonstrate their capabilities. Just make it interesting, relevant to the job and most importantly: short. Whatever time work sample testing requires should replace interview time, not add on to it. 2 hours is a reasonable ask. Oh, and you can't ask people to invest time in a work sample test unless you've already invested a significant amount of YOUR time on in-person interviews. [2] screening interview -> coding assignment -> maybe more interviews? = not cool screening interview -> first round with hiring manager -> coding assignment -> review assignment with candidate -> maybe more interviews? = cool Sources: [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232564809_The_Validity_and_Utility_of_Selection_Methods_in_Personnel_Psychology https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232564809_The_Valid... [2] Me. I'm a ex-Netflix software engineer, now run a tech recruiting company (www.facet.net). I've seen hundreds of technical interview processes across many industries.
  • wendyshu 6y ago
    How good a predictor is a GitHub account with open source contributions?
    • rsweeney21 6y ago
      I would argue that a GitHub account with open source contributions qualifies as a work sample test. It's just work that was done in the past.
  • _qulr 6y ago
    Tech Sector Job Interviews Assess Anxiety, Not Software Skills https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23848039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23848039
    • rsweeney21 6y ago
      The sample size in that study was pretty small.
  • 6y ago
• Glyptodon 6y ago
  I don't like coding challenges, but on the hiring side it turns out even really basic ones can filter out a huge chunk of people who can't code their way out of a paper bag. But for most jobs they don't really need to be anything crazy. It turns out that plenty of applicants have a hard time with things that are surprisingly simple and that's really all you need.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• Karupan 6y ago
  I get the general feeling that people on both sides of an interview want it to be exactly what they want it to be. That never happens. There are problems with the way tech interviews are conducted now, and we should aim to fix it. But human biases will always apply just like every other thing in life. My rule for interviews (whether as an interviewer or interviewee) is simple: 1. Explain/ask for the exact process and stages during the first call. 2. Raise any concerns as soon as possible. 3. Be ready for either outcome - if your concerns are reasonable and addressed, go ahead. If not, don’t.
• dizzle90210 6y ago
  The fact is, that without some demonstration of a candidate’s usefulness (their code) I cannot hire them. We used to use HR, now it is the head of engineering who runs our technical hiring. The process is very simple, complete a task, and if it is done correctly we start looking at soft skills. If you can’t do it in a manner that suggests you can hit the ground running, you are cut. Reality is harsh, and unpleasant. In an environment where resources are tightened by rapid growth, we cannot afford the trappings of these supposedly “superior and modern” hiring techniques. We need talent, not mediocrity.
• egsmi 6y ago
  One thing I always wonder, how do other professions do it? Do civil engineers have to make a building? Do chemists have to assay a sample? What makes programming so unique?
  • non-entity 6y ago
    Well for one you wont see Chemists or Civil Engineers from the variety of backgrounds developers come from. It's near impossible to become one without the degree.
• paledot 6y ago
  My employer carved out a standalone PHP script from a dark corner of a legacy application years ago. We show it to candidates and talk through what they'd do differently. I like it because I can judge not just the candidate's technical competence, but their level as well. If you're a junior, I can see if you have an eye for detail and pick up on the database query with a syntax error or mistyped variable name. If you're more senior, you'll tell me about job queues and workers. I had one candidate start with "the problem is the management structure that allowed this to happen in the first place". I have plenty of leading questions for candidates who are hesitant to criticize our code, and will tear it to pieces in front of them if necessary. And no, most importantly, it's not a take-home exam.
• 60secz 6y ago
  And I don't have time to hire you. You wouldn't hire a visual artist without seeing their portfolio. I don't hire a software developer until I they can quickly write a program that compiles read and follow a spec, name variables well, take feedback and ask relevant questions. To not test candidates for these skills would be recklessly negligent for my employer.