[sodapopcan]

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).

[sverhagen]

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.

[sodapopcan]

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.

[krisoft]

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.

[sverhagen]

> I wish they would just say as much

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).

[SoftTalker]

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.

[InCityDreams]

>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.