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by lifeisstillgood 4445 days ago
That's terribly negative. If you are doing agency work maybe (same website, same functionality, just different skin) but that vast vast open plains of http-based development are around and going to be around joining parts of the business, public world together in ways they do not know or imagine.

Yes, binary trees are pretty much coded for you, and you would be a fool to roll your own hashing algorithm for production, but thats still not a reason to keep your head down.

The next decade is going to be fun. Trust me
1 comments
dlss 4444 days ago
I don't understand this response. To be clear, I think web development is fun. I very much enjoy it and don't resonate with "keeping my head down".

I guess to reiterate my point: once you've done web development for a couple years, coding most websites is less about solving new problems and more about applying known solutions.

To reiterate how this point relates to the question of coding interviews: in as much as they don't test for lots of known solutions, and the ability to apply known solutions quickly, they aren't filtering for productive coders.

How does your response relate to the points at hand?

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lifeisstillgood 4444 days ago
but web development is not about "making new websites"

Think micro-services supplying REST APIs over HTTP - that's going to be same-y after a few years yes, but behind that is a world of business apps, integration challenges, complex algorithms and calculations - sorry I just see "web development" as "anything that has of will have an http access point" which I mentally count as "pretty much everything from here on in"

Programming tests do generally test for ability to apply known solutions quickly - it's about all they do do. You just have to know the known solutions (oh look calculate primes).

As for finding productive coders - well the amount of false negatives is large, and the false positive rate is probably higher (plenty of people who can waltz through these tests i find fairly poisonous to morale) so I am not a big fan - but if you need to make a first cut this is a good start

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