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Please stop the coding challenges

(blackentropy.bearblog.dev)
261 points CrazyEmi | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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paxys ◴[] No.42148318[source]
The more people online complain about coding interviews, the more confident I am that they are the absolute best way to filter candidates for a software development job. Across the industry there are way too many talkers/pretenders/meeting schedulers and not enough people who can roll up their sleeves, jump into the code and actually get stuff done. And this problem becomes worse at higher levels. You can bitch about it all you want, but you aren't owed that cushy $500K/yr FAANG job. If you can't get yourself to brush up on basic programming and write some for loops then companies will simply move on to someone who will.
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ironman1478 ◴[] No.42149168[source]
I am good at passing these interviews and am at a faang (will be moving to another one this month). These interviews are useless and provide a false signal on problem solving skills and people's abilities to learn things. The interviews specifically don't test whether or not somebody can roll up their sleeves and jump into code, because if it did why do I as a new hire have to explain so much about software engineering and debugging practices to people who have been here so long?

If you've actually worked at a large company, you'd know that 90% of the real work is done by like 5% of people (maybe even less). If the interviews worked this ratio would be so much better.

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drdrey ◴[] No.42150624[source]
what do you think would be a better test?
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1. ironman1478 ◴[] No.42150750[source]
For new grads, just let them in. Just make sure they know something so a simple coding exercise is maybe good there. For more senior people, actually talk about their resumes and try to understand what they did, why they did it, and importantly, if they actually did it. I never got asked anything about my previous experience when I got into my first faang beyond some superficial things like "what tools did you use".

I've seen interviews where you actually have to present a thing you've done and then explain the decision making process behind it, tradeoffs, outcomes, etc. those are more common outside of CS and I'd like to see more of that in CS. Or hell, have them write an essay describing the tradeoffs about some theoretical engineering decision. That'll give me actual info on how a person thinks.

For context, I used to work in self driving cars and had to interview many people who claimed to work in that field and claim to have worked on huge projects themselves. Then you dig deeper and it turns out they were part of a huge group, they never heard of this problem, that problem, never heard of this industry standard, etc. it's like, forget coding, this person doesn't even know the domain as much as they claim and not being upfront about that disqualifies you immediately in my books.