| They’re bull’s excrement, this industry’s interview process is broken and arbitrary. I don’t know if we’ll ever fix it, but code challenges certainly aren’t the answer. I’ve been developing professionally for 20 years. I take about 4 interviews a year when _not_ looking for a job to stay practiced. Held DoE, Staff, and Principle roles. Anecdotal evidence from this year: - given a decent sized MVC app with bugs and missing features. Tasked to green the test suite. PR comment from a pretty established engineer was “this is perfect, I wouldnt change anything.” I used 1 of my 4 hours and thought my work was poor - given a “simple”[1] sort and map/reduce a large log file and didn’t finish after 2 hours because the interviewer kept interrupting to ask me about the details of how internals of the language and GC worked - things I was familiar with, but I can’t focus on code and answering questions at the same time. I was ranked as “junior” and not a fit for the role, cute. This last one rolls up into one of the problems I have (and assume others have) in interviews: “work through the problem as you would, but talk out loud about your process” If I’m talking, I’m not in my zone. Let me shut the fuck up and solve the problem and we can talk about it afterwards. [1] “simply” parse this 500k line CSV file and aggregate some results, no dependencies. CSV file was actually a STDOUT log file that multiple containers were writing to with different formats, JSON, CSV, TSV, SSV, and random ass unstructured logs from a prod system. |