[p4wnc6]

The flip side of this is that most companies are "garbage" as you put it, and a lot of them simply do cargo cult imitations of the more popular companies. If a startup is saying they're going to disrupt the online vegan running shoes market and then tells me they have to weed out the "80% garbage applicants" with some parochial trivia about binary search trees that let's be honest none of us has given a shit about since we passed the exam on it in undergrad, then the code test absolutely is a big red flag to nope on out of there.

Since so many jobs are just shitty talent wasters, and you are just treated horribly, given poor equity terms, not paid what you're worth, etc., it unfortunately means that unless you have special knowledge that some particular job is non-shitty (like a trusted recommendation) then you're just better off erring on the side of nope.

[frcknfrckn]

If the company looks like garbage though, why are you applying?

[p4wnc6]

If the candidates look like garbage, why are you screening them?

You can't always tell. You begin part of the process, then the company says how great their Agile teams are, or how "collaborative" their open-plan surveillance workspace is, or they invite you to do a HackerRank test, and only now do you know the company is shit and you pass.

It's the same problem you face with the 60-80% unqualified applicants. I get messages from head hunters, direct recruiter emails on Stack Overflow, traditional recruiting firm phone calls, as well as occasional job listings that I locate through a job search.

80% of these jobs are shitty and need to be weeded out, even when they have plausible-seeming job descriptions and acceptable GlassDoor reviews.

[frcknfrckn]

I'm screening them to eliminate the garbage? I'm not sure I understand your point here. We don't choose the applicants we want to apply, the applicants choose which companies to apply for.

The problems with companies that you mention above have nothing to do with the coding test, it's the company itself. Those are perfectly valid reasons not to continue the application process. But eliminating a company because they apply a coding test as a basic level of applicant screening still strikes me as an arbitrary move that does nothing but rule out perfectly valid job opportunities.

[yeukhon]

Most people don't get to choose who to interview. Your manager or your recruiter does not have enough data to eliminate the 60% unfit. But the first 40% are already eliminated because those candidates did not pass even the first phone interview with a recruiter (think Google hiring process).

[p4wnc6]

My point is that candidates face that exact same problem when trying to weed out bad employers. That's why good developers reject the employers who try to use commodity tests like HackerRank. We do it for the same reason that the employer wants to use the commodity tests to weed out bad candidates. But somehow the employers don't understand they are just signalling how bad they are (apart from a very rare few companies).

[frcknfrckn]

Don't be so quick to speak for all developers. Most good developers I've encountered are willing to put some effort in to find the right job.

[p4wnc6]

HackerRank-like lazy, commodity evaluation is not remotely close to "put[ting] some effort in to find the right job." It's very critical that we don't allow people to make the false comparison between actual interview effort and daft HackerRank time-wasting.

In fact, doing the emotionally difficult task of rejecting an employer who tries the HackerRank commodity nonsense represents putting in more legitimate effort to find the right job and to judiciously choose to complete code evaluations for companies that aren't being lazy and wasting your time.