I have a different perspective. I feel that specific coding task tells me absolutely nothing about the seniority of the person performing the task and tells me very little about their qualifications.
Making direct comparisons of software to trades generally needs to stop. I understand that it's merely an analogy, but it's not a good one. Nails are extremely well understood with little room for improvement while the smallest piece of software is not so well understood and has infinite room for improvement. There are a handful of traits about an engineer that can make them incredibly valuable to an org that you'll never measure by putting the most weight on their ability to balance a binary tree (to use the cliched example).
This sub-thread was talking about "that specific coding task", not about binary tasks [edit: trees] in general. You might be very valuable building, say, a database application, while not being able to balance a binary tree, but if you can't do whatever we can all come up with as a small coding assessment ("little deck of cards"). It sounds to me like a good first filter, plus then a good talking piece to have a conversation about in an in-person.
Ya, my bad (and also to your sibling comment), I have trouble with HN comment depth sometimes.
Although I experienced recently what you said exactly! I was asked to build a deck of cards for the screening interview. It was a fun back-and-forth and I felt really good about things. Then in the next steps, I was asked to implement Conway's Game of Life. So like, I've been programming professionally for 13 years, I'm well aware of GoL and maybe should know how to do it, but I've never bothered since there are just a mountain of other projects, programming and not, that interest me over that. It's all good if you want your engineers to be able to solve that type of problem as it's your company and you do what you like with it. But like, they were an e-comm company and I have a ton of e-comm experience and was actually pretty into what they were doing, so why were they using something like GoL to assess me?
On the flip side of things to get a little tangential, I often feel companies reject me because they just don't like me, and I wish they would just say as much since that hurts way less than being told I'm a not a great engineer, lol.
Anyway, maybe a bit too much TMI... interviewing right now is a bit of a shitshow with all the recent layoffs and I'm maybe a little bitter, but also realllllly enjoying unemployment while it lasts.
Did they tell you to implement “Conway's Game of Life” in that many words, or they gave you the rules they wanted to implement?
If the first, that sounds like a terrible question. If the second, that sounds like a quite straightforward fizbuz style coding task.
> I'm well aware of GoL and maybe should know how to do it
What do you mean “should know how to do it”? I don’t think you should have memorised the rules, or an implementation. But I think if you are a software developer you should be able to turn human language into code. That is a key skill of the job.
Recruiters and subsequently hiring teams are often told they can't give much actual feedback to candidates, out of a fear for legal challenges. I cannot assess the validity of these fears, just relaying what I heard. I guess folks have been burned when their presumably-good faith attempts at feedback were twisted into inclusion and equal opportunity cases (which are also important subjects that I don't want to dismiss either).
That's why the programming tasks are simple. FizzBuzz, or "implement a deck of cards."
Sure there are different ways to do this but it's a small enough task that the quality of the solution is easy to judge.
I think the nail analogy works. If a blacksmith can't make a decent nail he shouldn't be hired. Same if a developer can't use one of a few very well-known standard library data structures to implement a deck of cards.
>I understand that it's merely an analogy, but it's not a good one.
Are there any good ones?
I find that people introduce an analogy...it is discussed, another 'contradictory' analogy is introduced....and eventually someone has 'won' the argument referring to something completely unrelated, and thereby have 'won' the original argument, by default.
My boss is particularly good at his :-) To me, its a form of gaslighting.
As soon as i hear "But what if...?", or "it's as if...", I refuse to budge, and simply ask "Are we talking about 'the original subject', or 'Blacksmiths'?
If it's the latter, let's talk about Japanese swordsmanship first, then the history of European metallurgy first - just to be on the same page."
Often used at the same time is the No True Scotsman fallacy.
Set ridiculous boundaries on the analogy, ignore the fallacies, and the original subject soon gets re-discussed. It's amazing how many people actualy find that uncomfortable.
The premise is that someone capable can blast through trivial assignments in no time. Either this is the final proficiency challenge or there are subsequent, harder questions. In the former case, why not see the salary/offer and then decide?
Typically, because one has other opportunities that are no less compelling and where potential employers show respect for candidates' time.
I have a GitHub profile with a lot of code on it and on my resume I highlight projects I've done a lot of work on. "What if faked tho?"--there's literally too much there to be worth faking. If a hiring manager looks at my resume, has the option of going to my GitHub profile, and between the two goes "I'm going to hand him a college-level Java problem because I'm not sure," then there probably isn't a way we're going to work together. And that's okay, on both sides of it; there are a lot of developers who aren't bothered by that kind of low-trust relationship. I am. Not a fit.
(This is in contrast to, for example, asking a question like that during an interview. Interviews are bidirectional, and are showing an investment in the hiring process on the part of the employer. If a card-deck Java problem is worth addressing with my time, then it's worth addressing with your interviewer's time. The contrapositive is also true.)
Personally, I only ever ask people to solve coding/problem-solving questions live. The best experience IMO is when we talk through the problem together, since this approximates what collaborating with this person on real tasks will be like - not very well at all, but about as well as one can do in the amount of time available for a live interview.
However, I do understand where the offline exercise idea comes from - it's not necessarily about lack of respect for candidates' time, but is generally done with the best of intentions in response to feedback, because candidates complain that the interview technical exercise scenario is needlessly artificial: in a live interview candidates do not usually have easy access to their usual tools or Google/Stackoverflow, and many feel pressure and panic from having to code/problemsolve live while someone is watching and feel they would do better if left alone to do the same thing for the same length of time.
Given the incredibly strong feelings either way, perhaps it might not be a terrible idea to let people choose which approach they prefer; but I've never seen any company's hiring do that, though, thinking about it, there really is no good reason why not (provided I still get to talk through the results of the offline exercise with the candidate during the live bit!)
I think this is a good analysis of where the offline idea started from, but in my experience the majority of interviewers who want you to do a "take home" thing are asking you to sign up for a multiple-hour mess of a project. That's where the lack of respect comes from, and the lack of acknowledgment of the market--most people you want to hire are already employed, after all, and time pressure from life is a thing.
Making it an option for somebody who would rather wouldn't be bad, but yeah, as you say, nobody's learning a lot about the other people that way, and they're probably more important.
(The OP's card deck problem is just faintly ridiculous and a bad allocation of the candidate's time, and I assume there are more hoops to jump through afterwards.)
> If a hiring manager looks at my resume, has the option of going to my GitHub profile, and between the two goes "I'm going to hand him a college-level Java problem because I'm not sure,"
I know we're talking hypotheticals. I get your position 100%, and good for you.
My view is that I'd tell you that
1. I've seen your Github profile
2. However, I didn't have time to go through your entire Github profile looking at your efficiency and productivity. I want to do a quick, ad-hoc programming exercise to see how fast you operate on basic tasks (which #1 doesn't readily address). I expect you to crush it really fast and this is the only coding exercise I'll have you do.
To me, that doesn't seem unreasonable if I'm upfront about expectations. Your response will also say a lot about you (not necessarily negative, but for fit).
These requirements come up because someone always slips through diligence. While you might be getting punished, interviewers are trying to de-risk candidates as much (and as fast) as possible.
> I want to do a quick, ad-hoc programming exercise to see how fast you operate on basic tasks (which #1 doesn't readily address).
Right. And to do so in good faith, this absolutely can and should be a collaborative exercise with an interviewer. It demonstrates that the employer has skin in the game and isn't body-shopping. Once you're out of junior/low-mid hiring, this is really, really important to getting quality candidates to go through your funnel.
> interviewers are trying to de-risk candidates as much (and as fast) as possible.
Of course they are. They should also be aware of the tradeoffs in doing so.
Now if we could just standardise this so you didn't have to do several coding assignments for every position you apply for. I'm sure most people needs to apply to more than one company to actually get hired, especially with all the layoffs now.
