| Have an up vote for calling out this practice as what it is: "recruiting hazing ritual". My personal favorite is when interviewing for a standard full stack web development role I'm asked to more or less re-implement some feature of an existing standard library rather than, for example, build a minimal slice of functionality that requires touching each layer of the stack in question. My finding on this is that companies in general tend to hire for traits and skills that will never be used in the role they're hiring for. In fact, if I'm a dev lead and a dev on my team reimplements a hand rolled version of java.util.concurrent.LinkedBlockingQueue rather than use the one that Java provides then we're going to have a problem. I'm sympathetic to the hiring manager here and I do understand that some people cant code a lick despite being able to talk reasonably well about it in an interview. I want to test drive a car before I buy it. I like to try on pants before buying them. Believe me I get it. Its been my experience that the coding challenge companies want to use is often a self aggrandizing, chest pounding kind of virtue signal about How Smart We Are Here. I suppose that if I had ever been given a reasonable assignment related to the actual job problem domain I might feel differently but this has never been the case. I also feel that coding challenges are just another manifestation of Analysis Paralysis where the ole "if I just had A LITTLE MORE INFORMATION" kicks in. An experienced interviewer (note I didn't say experienced developer) can smoke out 90% of this stuff in the space of a 2 hour interview. To be fair to the author here I found his write up to be an excellent effort to solve the ongoing problem that is hiring in general. An honest attempt to improve the situation. But consider the following: Hello Candidate, we need a [your problem domain here]. Verbally tell me how to build it while I ask you open ended questions about each step in the process. Once you get through telling me about each major component, responding to my questions along the way, we'll review and discuss the workability/pros/cons/compromises of the solution you describe. You may resolve any issues that arise in this process here. They either know the answers from the experience of having done it or something like it before or they don't. Call me names if you must but personally I've never understood whats so hard about this. Every Good Job I've ever had has hired me by this method. |