[frcknfrckn]

Was the sarcasm a bit much? Yeah, probably. But really, everyone makes hard decisions when it comes to jobs. I just find it somewhat amusing that someone would reject a company entirely because they disagree with one single facet of a multi-step interview process.

While we're at it, I don't particularly appreciate many of the insinuations people have made about my team and my employers based simply on the fact that I see a role for automated coding tests in the interview process. But like you said, I don't take it personally either.

Coding tests are just one tool in an interviewing toolbox. Like any tool, they can be - and are - abused. You feel that any use of that tool is indicative of some unredeemable flaw in the company as a whole. I feel that the tool has a genuine role in the initial candidate screening process. We obviously disagree, and are spinning our tires trying to convince each other, so there's really no point in continuing the discussion.

[p4wnc6]

> You feel that any use of that tool is indicative of some unredeemable flaw in the company as a whole.

This is a good summary of my position, except that it's not unredeemable. They could just stop using short, standardized, timed tests as a candidate evaluation, and instead they could acknowledge that there is no effective substitute for actually speaking with candidates, probing them about their experiences, and developing more nuanced understanding. Doing so would be time consuming and expensive ... that's life. Papering over the reality of the situation by pretending like automated, timed, standardized tests can measure the thing you need to measure won't make reality go away.

If a company is verifiably an excellent place to work and has excellent technology culture, and this can be verified ahead of time, then they do have the negotiation power to respectfully require completing code trivia (although most of the firms that actually are excellent don't do it this way even though they could).

Firms that are question marks to a candidate prior to some kind of phone interview to assess the fit, experience, and the nature of the role have no business trying to cheaply avoid the required costs of candidate evaluation. By trying to be cheap about it, they send a bad signal (and also generally don't succeed in getting the candidate pool they want to get).

Short, standardized, timed tests have no place in professional software hiring. Literally none. A company that uses such tests definitely raises red flags. It may be a sign of unredeemable dysfunction in the company, it may be some misguided HR initiative, it may be a totally fine place to work. The candidate can't tell and it's seriously not in their interest to waste effort on whatever the test is going to be.

There are just too many bad jobs ... the better decision rule is to always reject and if you end up rejecting an otherwise good job that somehow ended up using short, timed, standardized testing, oh well. The loss function is not symnmetric. Ending up in a dysfunctional job just because you felt good about acing their code test is a far worse outcome than rejecting an otherwise good job and being overly selective about where to work.

[frcknfrckn]

Yup, I still genuinely disagree with most of your points. Just not seeing the connection between using an interviewing tool and being a dysfunctional company. But like I said, spinning tires, etc. All the best to you going forward!

[p4wnc6]

I think the problem is that you continue referring to it as an interview tool just because it is a thing that can be used for interviewing.

Making candidates stand on one leg and recite the alphabet backwards would also be an "interviewing tool" but it's not legitimate, just as short, timed, standardized coding tests are also not legitimate. Playing semantic games about whether it's an "interview tool" is not worthwhile. The question has nothing to do with whether it's logically possible to be used as part of an interview. The point is that it cannot provide the kinds of evidence that people claim it provides, and so continued usage of it for interviews can only be explained by other reasons, which is when it begins to be evidence of dysfunction.

[frcknfrckn]

That's not 'the problem'. That's the disagreement. You claim it's not a legitimate tool. I say that it is. We obviously disagree and this is going absolutely nowhere.

[p4wnc6]

You say

> Just not seeing the connection between using an interviewing tool and being a dysfunctional company.

This is problematic because you're not representing my position. It's somewhat of a straw-man. You're saying that I'm saying that the use of some legit interview tool spells dysfunction.

But I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the use of an illegitimate interview tool (timed, standardized tests) is a sign of dysfunction.

Whether or not you see a connection between using an interview tool and dysfunction is irrelevant, because we would both agree that there's a connection between using an illegitimate tool and dysfunction.

So the disagreement happens at least one layer back, at the point where I claim that timed, standardized tests are not actually useful for determining who will be good at a job. The disagreement, and the whole discussion, has nothing whatsoever to do with "just using an interview tool."

I think it's very important to be pedantic about this, because in a lot of cases you keep referring to the timed tests as an interview tool, and speaking about them that way fails to acknowledge that the tests are not capable of producing the kinds of evaluation output necessary for actually determining who would be good at a job.

For example, a great engineer with loads of experience and glowing letters of recommendation about how effective they have been in previous roles might just be a very anxious timed test taker and tend to do badly on timed tests for reasons mostly of anxiety. Since the test is artificial and has no relationship to the actual work they would do if hired, rejecting them based on a failure on the test is a poor business decision.

It doesn't even have to be as extreme as an anxiety issue with test taking. A person could just simply disprefer working in a constrained, timed environment like a browser-based IDE with a literal clock ticking down. They might be a great developer, yet cannot even write FizzBuzz in that situation because it is so utterly and unreasonably alien compared to the manner in which they would do work in a real job.

The tests just simply are not legitimate ways of measuring programming ability. They do not control for all of the bespoke ways a person can appear bad via a timed test, yet still be good, nor do they account for all of the ways a person can appear good on a timed test, yet perform badly on higher-level thinking tasks, open-ended time management, or creative tasks like system design.

Very truly, the tests, and organizations like HackerRank, exist because it's a convenient fiction for HR and management, especially in companies that doesn't have very much of a technology staff to vet candidates. These places are happy to drink the HackerRank Kool-Aid because it gives them all kinds of plausible deniability about hiring the wrong people. It's very similar to the way that management consultants, far from actually functioning in any analytical capacity that benefits their client, really just exist to sort out internal power struggles through means of credential and prestige. It's very much a status-signaling sort of behavior. And it's even worse in the cases when a company adopts something like HackerRank just because some other, supposedly fancy, company adopted it.

Because of all of this and much more, it's just very critical to continue pedantically ensuring that no claim of the tests being valid, legitimate evaluation tools goes unchallenged.

[frcknfrckn]

And yet you are misrepresenting what I have claimed about coding tests. I have never once claimed it as useful for determining who would be GOOD at a job. I have claimed they are useful for filtering out applicants who are completely unable to do a job. This is an incredibly useful thing to do when swamped with dozens of similar applications for, say, a junior developer role. But again, this is just a first step. By no means should this test determine who gets hired, it merely helps narrow down the interview pool to something more manageable.

Is there a risk of falsely filtering good applicants? Yes. But that is the exception, not the rule.

Sigh. Why do I keep letting myself get sucked back into this? You see it as an illegitimate tool. I see it as legitimate. We disagree. I'm not going to agree with you, and you're not going to agree with me. So I'm done here. If you'd like to keep arguing by yourself, you go right ahead.