me: i’ve single-handedly written software used by tens of millions of people, you can see it right over at github.com/april
prospective employers: sorry, but unfortunately you did poorly in a high-stress 40-minute coding exercise, writing code with no time to think about how to solve a problem you’ve never seen before, in a terrible dev environment, while someone stares at you the whole time
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@april that doesn't sound like an environment one would want to work in
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@jomo nope it’s entirely unnatural and uncomfortable and doesn’t reflect real development at all and yet it’s a fundamental part of almost every single hiring loop because ???
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@april hmm, is this a US(-company) thing? And/Or a big corp thing? I think nearly all of the weird hiring stories I've heard were from big US corps.
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@jomo maybe it’s a US only thing but pretty much every tech company does it, with a few enlightened ones (such as Netflix) doing smart take home coding exercises instead.
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@april @jomo I blame google. Before google, most of my interviews were conversations (in a few a gave presentations of my past work), and the only ones that gave quizzes were at the mediocre bureacracies you'd expect: IT consultancies, government contractors...(one of my colleagues, who wrote a Java book and applied for one of the same jobs I did, threw his coding quiz in the garbage). But programmers follow the fads, and they liked to give logic puzzles popular because that's what Microsoft did (same with Hungarian notation). Then Google came along with their big IPO and multi-day hazing ritual, and they're the new Microsoft.
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@april @jomo Its not a US thing, its a corporate thing. Corporate likes checklists because checklists delegate responsibilities, so hiring someone because they pass all the tests is just comfy for the person doing the hiring.
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@ck @april @jomo happens in small startups in Germany too, all the time. I'm yet to see a single company that doesn't have a coding challenge (ranging from one-hour coding in a terrible environment during the interview, to unpaid take-home exercise taking three days of time and basically checking how good are you at writing tedious boilerplate which should either not be done or be automated at the company you're interviewing at).
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@IngaLovinde @april @jomo Sure, it's become a thing because everyone wants to be Google, don't they? For startups, its of course very attractive to just adopt other corps processes. You don't have to invest time and actually think about what you want out of a candidate, you just slap a standard-leet-code-exelence label on it and it'll probably be good enough. The process is also pretty much industry standard by now so you can be reasonably sure every candidate expects and acceptes it as such.
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@ck @april @jomo I'm applying to a startup with ~30 people right now, one of the few that make their hiring process transparent and list all the stages in public.
So this process? An hour-long call with HR, an hour-long interview with the hiring manager, a day-long (by the looks of it) take-home challenge (where you are required to spend half-day just to create a scaffolding for a new CRUD service), 2-hour interview on take-home challenge with 3-4 developers, half-hour interview with CTO, hour-long interview with the remaining developers on the team they're hiring into, half-hour interview with product owner, optionally half-hour interview with CEO. That's six or seven interviews with 10+ people, for 6+ hours of interviewing time alone (plus the take-home assignment).
And this is not even atypical. And they're just a regular startup doing regular startup things, solving regular boring business problems, no rocket science or anything, not anywhere near, say, Igalia level of tech competence. (I would have zero questions if Igalia or similar places had this kind of a hiring process.)
And of course if at any of the stages any of the interviewers thinks that you're too queer or too neurospicy or just too much not of a techbro, you're out.
(Incidentally, searching for "software engineer" on the "people" tab of their linkedin produces twenty identically looking dudes, as if they were clones, and nobody else.)
IDK maybe this is what people mean when they say "vetocracy".
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@IngaLovinde @april @jomo Yeah, if a startup with ~30 people has that much overhead I'd stay clear. I read those as warning signs for the CEO being a control freak which at a company of that size usually means middle management is afraid or does not have the mandate to make any decisions, meaning day to day operations usually suck.
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@ck @april @jomo the problem is, most startups seem to have processes like that, maybe a bit shorter, but general idea is the same
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@IngaLovinde @april @jomo To a degree, I can understand where they are coming from. 50% of people working in IT have less than 5 years of experience, > 50% of those 50% call themselves senior even though their skill level is equivalent to mediocre Medium posts. If you are in the position (as a company) to actually use the six months probation to find out if someone is actually capable, that's quite the luxury.
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@ck @april @jomo but that's the funny thing, all this vetocracy means that they are going to hire someone who is vaguely ok for all ten interviewers, over someone who gets nine out of ten very excited but one out of ten unhappy (because queer or neurospicy or not a man or not into cryptoshit or something else).
So they end up hiring a very mediocre techbro identical to the ones they already have, who can somewhat write code but not more than that, passing over highly qualified candidates (because a highly qualified candidate who is a cishet man is not going to apply for a startup where they only pay regular average salary anyway).
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@IngaLovinde @april @jomo I'm not saying I agree with the method, as a matter of fact, I'd agree with you take, but I can see why it's a shitty situation all around. The market us turning around an junior are no longer getting hired easily because nobody can / wants to afford training them into actual professionals. That puts additional pressure on the hiring process to filter aggressively.
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@ck @april @jomo but even if you want to filter out juniors, you can easily do this on CV screening stage.
Feels weird to apply with great CV covering two decades of professional experience, with small but still reasonable body of work linked, with list of open-source projects done, only for a chance to pass the screening and get subjected to that seven-step process where they don't even check "can she code?" to filter out liars, but "do I like her? Did we connect as humans during this hour?"
Not that I had any choice of course.
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@IngaLovinde @ck @april @jomo exactly why I'm not even trying to apply for anything
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@lena @ck @april @jomo unfortunately not trying to apply for anything won't pay the bills...
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@april @jomo
being normal, you forget about emotional torture sessions that may happen for someone's enjoyment.
Now, when a company has hair in fire moment, it is management's priority to make everything possible for a maximal calm in your brain, so that you fix whatever there needs to be fixed. Sleep schedules, whatever.
In this context, it looks like in "debugging under fire" conditions, management expects to at gasoline to the fire.
There is no other rational explanation, unless they've just lied into your face, which is also disqualifying.
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@april @jomo I usually associate it with a trust issue, or at least starting with that. Someone is concerned you didn't actually write what's in your portfolio or that you would cheat on a take home exercise.
I feel like you can be reasonably sure a candidate wrote some existing code by talking to them about it in enough detail. Anyone who can fake that can also fake skills that a 30min coding test wouldn't test.
It's the same kind of mindset that wants doctor's note for every sick day or wants to install a bunch of monitoring tools when people work remotely.
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@PlasmaGryphon @jomo if someone can fake 15 years of code, pull requests, issue comments, gists, and what not then i’d be pretty danged impressed. especially if they all that while their github username was literally their first name.
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@april @jomo someone somewhere probably has falsely claimed to own a GitHub account they didn't, but that is not a scenario anyone should worry about.
I'm much more used to getting candidates where all of their coding portfolio is proprietary and inaccessible to interviewer. Then it is a matter of figuring out what they actually wrote. A short coding test still isn't going to convey many relevant skills anyway.
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@april @PlasmaGryphon @jomo
"we're not going to hire you as a programmer because we're certain you fabricated your entire professional history; on the other hand: wanna join our red team?"
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@april @jomo Because some companies created a business around this and HR and Managers that wanna turn human crafting into Ford-esque lines of production liked the idea.
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@april @jomo if only there was https://zerohr.io
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@jomo @april exactly, interviews really are a two way street. the way they are setup and run tells you a ton about the corp culture
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@april they want people they can put in a crunch
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@licho @april
Speaking, demoing, and applying for a job create a type of high stress that's very different from the stress of, say, fixing critical production issues or working under a tight deadline.
I would argue that there are very few conclusions to draw from that kind of crunch.
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@tcurdt @licho I could see an exercise like this for a sysadmin, asking them to figure out why something is broken. That is frequently their job. Code developed this way, however, is almost universally garbage.
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@april “…that’s why we need H1b visas…it’s literally impossible to find real talent in the US…plus we can pay them half as much, they sleep under their desks, eat out of a food cart we have show up outside, don’t have to provide benefits or a 401k, and can simply throw them back when we’re done…ok…next slide…we have this new business space that is opening up…online puppy mills…we ship ‘em to people in a Chewey box…”
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@ministerofimpediments @april what's up with the random xenophobia? I spent a long time on an H1B visa, and I too have built highly-leveraged software
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@rain @april there is no random xenophobia. Anything but. A lot of corporations (in the US) import workers they know they can underpay/take advantage of. Not all of them and not all fields, but it is certainly common enough practice to be a trope. Foreign workers should be paid the same. They shouldn’t work in fear of losing their visa. Corporations shouldn’t use those same workers as leverage to drive down salaries/benefits in fields that aren’t actually underserved.
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@rain @april h1b specialist visas are used as a carrot and a stick. My comment was directed at the corporations and not the workers. (…the same as the whole mail order puppy mill quip…I’m anti puppy mill but very pro-puppy.)
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@ministerofimpediments @april ok, thanks for clarifying! your comment just pattern matched with a lot of xenophobic ones is all. Bernie was particularly atrocious: he straight up wants to destroy any market power visa workers might have by calling for them to be the last ones hired and the first ones fired
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@april yeah. Fucktechbros and their sharpshooter "tests."
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Feel this.
@april
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And you failed because the program you wrote that solved the problem had weird variable names.
@april
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@april this seems to be a characteristic of Big American Tech. I have never been subjected to such abuse in the hiring process nor have I subjected any candidates to it. But, I don't work for an American based software company.
Perhaps it at least partially explains the dystopian work environments at places like Amazon (it's not just their warehouse workers they disrespect) as well as the deterioration of their products and services. While such techniques may work to audition contestants for a reality TV game show it's an awful way to find software developers. People who do "well" on such high pressure exercises tend to create more poorly designed, lower quality production code, at least when left to their own devices.
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@msh @april
It’s the reboot of the industrial age hyper capitalist “self made man” lumber baron model taught in business schools, skinned over a IoT construct.
Sprinkled with some manifest destiny and possibly eugenics (only the strongest survive), and you’ve got greed’s glow up for a modern age.
I’m the most cynical optimist you’ll ever meet.
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@april Cruel.
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@april I have no idea how it's been this long and the stupid coding tests still haven't died out
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@april they gave you 40 minutes?!
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@april what would be your preferred way for them to have tested your technical skills?
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@toldtheworld either looking at past experiences or allowing a take home test where they can develop in their usual IDEs with access to debuggers and all the other usual creature comforts
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@april
I was given a coding test for potential candidates by the Head of Software at a company I used to work at.
I failed it.
Then I saw the "correct/preferred" solution.
Then I spent 15 minutes schooling the HoS on why that solution was crap, and how my solution was literally 3 orders of magnitude more efficient, easier to debug, and overall made more sense.
To be fair the HoS reconsidered the test and I think actually scrapped it before inflicting it on anyone.
coding tests are bullshit.
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@april I did it without anyone looking over my shoulder and I still sucked.
I’m glad to see I’m not the only who thinks he’s decent at their job but sucks at this very specific type of problem that is rarely seen in day to day work.
I didn’t write software used by 10s of millions of people (I think) so I’m definitely a step behind there.
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@april yeah I've never understood this. I've hired developers and I'm like. Take this home, have the week, use whatever you need.
Because that is what the real world is like for developers
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@april yes and
employers: "it's funny, when we give you your accessibility based font+color settings and keyboard settings, you seem to perform admirably, but when we pigeon hole you into a raw field with an onChange publisher over a websocket to let us watch you write in low-vision hostile fonts+colors with no macros or disabled-friendly typing assistants, you seem like a pretty shit coder.
Thank you for applying, the role has been filled."
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@bujiraso yup, it’s so weird how much harder it is to code without my familiar color scheme and familiar font and familiar keybindings.
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@april @bujiraso Hah! Feel this so much; if it's not displayed with Hack font it's illegible.
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@khleedril @bujiraso same for me (except monolisa for development)
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@april
It's like asking a concert violinist to audition using an oboe.
@bujiraso
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@undead @april @bujiraso This is a great analogy.
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@april @bujiraso I recommend at least having some vim bindings on keyboard / OS level, e.g. through a software or programmable keyboards (QMK / Vial firmware).
Super convenient to be able to use them anywhere..
Colors are less important for me tbh.
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@april because that's how production software should be released, in a hurry without thinking about it and doing no research, while your boss looks over your shoulder
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@technicat @april The only professional parallel I can think of to timed coding tests is certain parts of video game development, where you're the programmer and the designer wants to iterate fast on a bunch of variants of a new game mechanic.
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@PinoBatch @technicat @april there are definitely occasions where “coding under fire” is a thing, such as when you’re trying to fix a major bug that’s costing your org or your customers millions of dollars an hour.
But it’s supremely weird to exclude talent that’s not great under those conditions. You need a few folks in the org that can handle that and still do decent work. It definitely doesn’t need to be everyone (and those folks are not typically your best programmers, even).
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@calcifer @PinoBatch @technicat “coding under fire” incidents are still usually done in your usual development environment and typically involve code you’re familiar with, with a suite of debugging tools. and not some weird puzzle that was dropped in front of your face minutes ago where you’re forced to work in the worst development environment ever.
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@april @PinoBatch @technicat absolutely true. A test is never going to perfectly mimic reality though.
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@april It's a self fulfilling blessing/curse. You get the blessing of avoiding what they get cursed with. Having to work with other people selected by that process. I applaud it really.
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@april it’s the absolute worst
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