Senior devs. Is anyone else insulted by coding exams?
by dtagames on Hacker News.
After an invitation to apply for a job with a YC company yesterday (an email from the CEO offering to “have a conversation”) I got a generic invite to take an online coding test in Javascript. I’ve written JS and shipped numerous apps in it over the last 20 years and let me tell ya, if anyone worked for me and wrote code like I saw on those tests, I’d fire them. My favorite was a sort question that had an obvious bug. Both sides of the sort had the same test (so no sorting would happen). But the question wasn’t about that… it was about which input would tell you the code was wrong. This is most ridiculous way to diagnose or fix a bug that I’ve heard of. Nobody who really works on software works on these kind of bugs. And this diagnostic technique of arbitrarily working backwards to force a multiple choice solution is probably the worst method of programming that I’ve ever come across. No wonder so many companies are hiring shitty programmers and writing garbage code. Without an actual problem and an understanding of the problem domain, no programmer is going to write anything useful for you. Frankly, I’m frustrated by this method of interviewing and selecting candidates. It makes me not want to work at places that do this. Anyone else have a similar experience? Also, hiring managers… Do you find these kind of tests useful? Why? How?