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Three years ago I started rejecting interviews that included banal code challenges unrelated to the positions, leetcode, and hackerrank stuff. Basically anythin

Three years ago I started rejecting interviews that included banal code challenges unrelated to the positions, leetcode, and hackerrank stuff. Basically anything involving Coderpad et al. The result in a 40% increase in total comp and having worked for some very high quality folks and with extremely pleasant folks. My job satisfaction has never been higher.

hkt 5y ago
Seconded. I've never done leetcode but have gone through some hiring processes which set challenges that were totally irrelevant to my role. One place asked me to write a simple SPA in angular with a three day (!) time limit. I'm a DevOps guy and it was a DevOps role. I ditched and was reasonably pleased to have done so.
alecbz 5y ago
FWIW I think you can absolutely ask practical, grounded coding questions in a coderpad environment (I believe $current_employer does).
- andrew_ 5y ago
  In my 21 years in the industry, I've never seen one. Schrodinger's Code Challenge. There's also the issue of Coderpad et al being a sterile, primitive, unfriendly environment. Not the editor or IDE a candidate is comfortable with. (Additionally, I want to know about a candidate's editor and setup. It reveals a number of things I'm interested in) And I like candidates to be comfortable to be able to be their true selves. Then there's the awkward "wait while you code," folks sitting on the other side that you don't really know, waiting or trying to make some kind of polite commentary to let the candidate know they're not being ignored or forgotten. And the candidate trying to talk through code, again with people they don't really know or have any social basis with. Coderpad is a horrible environment for interviews. That said, I have seen VSCode's Live Share used successfully, where all parties were engaged and contributing to code in the same session. That was on an actual job-applicable, practical exercise.
  - baggachipz 5y ago
    Last time I had to do one of these idiotic challenges (on Triplebyte), I had an in-browser text box for code input, and a set of tests (some hidden) as the output on the right. I had no debug capability, no log, no feedback of any kind besides clicking the "run" button and seeing if tests pass or if it doesn't compile correctly. Of course I failed the challenge, because the way I write code is to take a first try, inspect errors, step through lines, and refine to get it as it needs to be. This was all impossible in this "environment" I was forced to use. Even worse, it has a timer ticking down the entire time, taunting you as you come ever closer to "failure". What a miserable excuse for a test of my abilities. I will refuse to complete these challenges as a matter of course, and encourage others to do so as well.
    - imhoguy 5y ago
      What I do with such is I copy-paste the challenge scaffolding to my local IDE to make the solution. Once done I copy-paste the resulting code back to the web interface for a run. Worked well during my off-line challenges years ago. Otherwise I would refuse coding over any cr*py interface, especially live coding.
      - alecbz 5y ago
        FWIW $employer is also okay with candidates working in their local environment if they're comfortable screen sharing. IME most people seem to prefer coderpad though, even after being nudged that using a local environment may be more helpful for writing tests.
      - baggachipz 5y ago
        I considered that too; in this instance, I had 7 minutes to complete the "challenge". That wasn't enough time to copy over the test cases and get things configured properly for that. Still terrible that we have to even try to work around these terrible interfaces.
        andrew_ 5y ago

hkt 5y ago

Seconded. I've never done leetcode but have gone through some hiring processes which set challenges that were totally irrelevant to my role. One place asked me to write a simple SPA in angular with a three day (!) time limit. I'm a DevOps guy and it was a DevOps role. I ditched and was reasonably pleased to have done so.

alecbz 5y ago

FWIW I think you can absolutely ask practical, grounded coding questions in a coderpad environment (I believe $current_employer does).

andrew_ 5y ago
In my 21 years in the industry, I've never seen one. Schrodinger's Code Challenge. There's also the issue of Coderpad et al being a sterile, primitive, unfriendly environment. Not the editor or IDE a candidate is comfortable with. (Additionally, I want to know about a candidate's editor and setup. It reveals a number of things I'm interested in) And I like candidates to be comfortable to be able to be their true selves. Then there's the awkward "wait while you code," folks sitting on the other side that you don't really know, waiting or trying to make some kind of polite commentary to let the candidate know they're not being ignored or forgotten. And the candidate trying to talk through code, again with people they don't really know or have any social basis with. Coderpad is a horrible environment for interviews. That said, I have seen VSCode's Live Share used successfully, where all parties were engaged and contributing to code in the same session. That was on an actual job-applicable, practical exercise.
- baggachipz 5y ago
  Last time I had to do one of these idiotic challenges (on Triplebyte), I had an in-browser text box for code input, and a set of tests (some hidden) as the output on the right. I had no debug capability, no log, no feedback of any kind besides clicking the "run" button and seeing if tests pass or if it doesn't compile correctly. Of course I failed the challenge, because the way I write code is to take a first try, inspect errors, step through lines, and refine to get it as it needs to be. This was all impossible in this "environment" I was forced to use. Even worse, it has a timer ticking down the entire time, taunting you as you come ever closer to "failure". What a miserable excuse for a test of my abilities. I will refuse to complete these challenges as a matter of course, and encourage others to do so as well.
  - imhoguy 5y ago
    What I do with such is I copy-paste the challenge scaffolding to my local IDE to make the solution. Once done I copy-paste the resulting code back to the web interface for a run. Worked well during my off-line challenges years ago. Otherwise I would refuse coding over any cr*py interface, especially live coding.
    - alecbz 5y ago
      FWIW $employer is also okay with candidates working in their local environment if they're comfortable screen sharing. IME most people seem to prefer coderpad though, even after being nudged that using a local environment may be more helpful for writing tests.
    - baggachipz 5y ago
      I considered that too; in this instance, I had 7 minutes to complete the "challenge". That wasn't enough time to copy over the test cases and get things configured properly for that. Still terrible that we have to even try to work around these terrible interfaces.
      - andrew_ 5y ago