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Please stop the coding challenges

(blackentropy.bearblog.dev)
261 points CrazyEmi | 3 comments | 15 Nov 24 15:32 UTC | HN request time: 0.595s | source
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lijok ◴[15 Nov 24 16:13 UTC] No.42148208[source]▶
> When was the last time you had to debug an ancient codebase without documentation or help from a team?

> This is like asking a Ruby developer to debug PHP as a test of flexibility

> If the job requires specific tech skills, test those skills

Sounds like someone failed a coding challenge.

In all seriousness, you need to understand that companies rarely implement their hiring practices for the sake of it. It is usually the best their collective minds could come up with. Telling them to get rid of it without attempting to understand what problem they're trying to solve and without offering alternatives, is, to say the least, not a productive use of anyone's time.

I find in software development we try to reinvent the wheel all too often instead of borrowing practices from other professions. Let's have a look at what civil engineers have to go through to get hired at half the salary of a software dev, and let's incorporate that into our practice. That will make everyone a happy trooper !

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1. jedberg ◴[15 Nov 24 17:44 UTC] No.42149118[source]▶
> In all seriousness, you need to understand that companies rarely implement their hiring practices for the sake of it. It is usually the best their collective minds could come up with.

Unlikely. It's usually what the most senior person either read about or experienced in the past. In fact I'd say that it is highly unlikely that they did any introspection at all as to what they are actually trying to accomplish.

They just did it like everyone else because they believe exactly what you do -- that someone somewhere created the process with intention.

I feel like we've so lost the plot with tech hiring that we settled on what appears at best to be a local maxima.

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2. tdeck ◴[15 Nov 24 18:05 UTC] No.42149328[source]▶
Folks on this forum mostly won't remember but about 20 years ago the in-vogue way of interviewing software engineers was to ask "puzzle questions" (e.g. "I have 100 ball bearings and two are a different weight than the rest....") and "lateral thinking" questions ("why are manhole covers round?") because that's what they did at Microsoft and everyone copied Microsoft.

I'm told this is still the common style of interview for mechanical engineers, which says something about what it's like to work in that industry too.

3. lcnPylGDnU4H9OF ◴[15 Nov 24 20:49 UTC] No.42150845[source]▶
> In fact I'd say that it is highly unlikely that they did any introspection at all as to what they are actually trying to accomplish.

Based on the observations I've made of hiring managers I've worked with, what they're trying to accomplish is to provide the appearance to HR that they at least attempted an unbiased hiring process. The result often resembles a "literacy test" and I suspect one has to be very intentional about avoiding that to practically avoid it.