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Please stop the coding challenges

(blackentropy.bearblog.dev)
261 points CrazyEmi | 2 comments | 15 Nov 24 15:32 UTC | HN request time: 0.398s | source
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ecshafer ◴[15 Nov 24 17:47 UTC] No.42149154[source]▶
> These high-stress, solo coding assignments don’t reflect the actual job. Instead, they put developers in situations they’d never face in the workplace, where collaboration and support are standard. When was the last time you had to debug an ancient codebase without documentation or help from a team?

I have had to do this, on numerous occasions. Sometimes there is a system that no one who built it is left, the documentation doesn't exist or can't be found, and that's it. This is not a great example. Being able to debug a program, follow requests around and see what's happening is a good skill.

What this example is really bad at though is that you pigeonhole yourself into developers. If you have a legacy php application, you are weeding out the java, python, ruby, go etc developers that do have those skills but don't know php and will be slower at it. Despite them possibly being stronger developers given a couple months of hands on php.

> A “4-hour” assignment can quickly turn into 8, 10, or even more, just to ensure it’s in great shape.

This I agree with. Suggested time can easily be gamed, so someone who has more time can look like a better candidate.

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sanderjd ◴[15 Nov 24 17:51 UTC] No.42149186[source]▶
When I interviewed at Stripe, they had a "debug this!" question ready to go in a number of languages. (I think the list was something like: ruby, java, python, javascript, go, maybe one or two more.) I thought this was pretty great, but also seemed pretty labor intensive.
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1. ecshafer ◴[15 Nov 24 17:55 UTC] No.42149231[source]▶
That is the way to do it, good on Stripe. Its definitely labor intensive, but I think that you either need to outsource it or be big enough that you can source the talent to build a half-dozen plus idiomatic and kind of big applications to make it a good test.
replies(1): >>42149645 #
2. sanderjd ◴[15 Nov 24 18:43 UTC] No.42149645[source]▶
Yeah. In general I was impressed with Stripe's interview process. It was still the usual miserable day-long gauntlet, but with some thoughtful decisions mixed in, IMO. (This was 2022, FWIW.)

I'm pretty sure the thing they had me debug was a real bug they had hit in an open source dependency. It seemed like they had hit the bug, taken a snapshot of the code at that version, and written a test to exercise it. (And presumably then they fixed it, separately.) So it felt a lot like bugs I run into in the wild, but with some of the hard debugging work out of the way (getting it to the point of an easy repro in a unit test) in order to time-box it. I really thrived in this interview. It may be the only interview I've ever done where I felt like I was just using my actual skills like I would during the work day.