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Ask HN: Can you actually get a dev job without doing a stupid quiz?

by protocontrol on 11/20/18, 5:43 AM with 65 comments

• by rpeden on 11/20/18, 1:09 PM

  There are lots of companies that don't do these kinds of tests.

  It's been a while since I've done a job search, but several people I know have done them recently. And they've all found that some companies - mainly big tech companies, along with tech startups of all kinds - use these kinds of tests heavily.

  Other companies that hire lots of developers - like banks, insurance companies, and manufacturers - don't seem to use these tests nearly as much. They'll sit down with you, talk about your experience, and the systems you've built.

  At this point, if they like you, they'll often give you a small test project to do. And when I say small, I mean small - probably an hour at most. And while these projects can be annoying, these companies seem to give it after they've interviewed you and they're serious about moving forward. I don't mind this approach. There are lots of people out there working as developers who write truly awful code, so I think it's fair of them to want to see something from you before making an offer.

  Working as a developer for a non-tech company might sound awful, but some of them are actually really great places to be. From what I've heard from devs I've talked to, many of these old school companies are actually really progressive technically, pay their developers well, and treat them with plenty of respect. And they tend to very sane work hours too. If your manager sees you still in the office at 5:05pm on a Friday, they'll probably tell you to go home. :)

• by GuiA on 11/20/18, 10:29 AM

  Let me preface this by saying I despise whiteboarding as much as you do. I’ve been rejected from jobs dozens of time, and only got a handful of job offers in my ~10 year career so far.

  But - all interviews are, in essence, is an exercise in virtue signaling. Can you do the local dance to prove that you belong?

  If anything, whiteboard interviews are not the worst thing ever. I am from a Western European country, and my dad is a chemical engineer at a large chemical company with 30+ years experience, many patents, books, etc.

  When I explained to him the interview processes I had to go through to get jobs in Silicon Valley, he exclaimed “oh wow that’s great! I wish we had that! Our interview process is a 1 hour conversation with a manager, and if you went to the same school as them or share the same hobbies, you get the job. We hire so many mediocre people because of that, I wish we actually asked them to solve technical problems”.

  Now that I think about it, I actually declined a job offer once from a startup because their interview process with me was a 1 hour presentation where I showed some of my work, and then a phone call with HR. I thought to myself - wow, this is too easy. If I get an offer this easily, what caliber of people am I going to be working with?

  Pick your poison.

• by hallihax on 11/20/18, 12:41 PM

  Tests like these are a relatively effective way of weeding out people who simply aren't up to the job. You can say anything you like about yourself, and you can curate your online presence to make yourself look like an experienced, competent developer, but your code doesn't lie.

  I agree that tests can be bad, frustrating, badly designed or just plain incompetent - but ultimately I'd rather hire someone who knows what they don't know than someone who thinks they can wing it. When I've been tested like this in the past, I just explain which questions I can't answer and why. If they want to talk it through, then great. If not, then do I want to work for them anyway if the attitude seems negative?

  The real issue you need to overcome is fear of failure. Aside from some specific cases, nobody in the hiring process really cares whether or not you 'pass' the test - it is (or should be) more important to assess how you approach the problem and whether you are capable of acknowledging what you don't know and talking through your thinking.

• by sawmurai on 11/20/18, 12:22 PM

  I think the only interviewing process that really works is to invite the candidate to work for one day, side by side with their future team.

  This also gives the candidate a glimpse into the culture behind the HR marketing bs.

• by byoung2 on 11/20/18, 6:38 AM

  My latest job search (Oct-Nov 2018) involved 6 different companies all requiring quizzes or live coding (I only applied to 100% remote jobs). I got "code an elevator controller", "code a number guessing game", "architect a analytics system to handle 1M data points for under $2k per month on AWS", "build a react app to let users pick a timezone and display the current time in it", "code a tic tac toe game", and "build a reusable dialog box component". With each exercise taking about 2 hours, it was a significant chunk of what could have been billable time. One company made an offer (the number guessing game one), which I accepted. In the end it was my open source project on github that won them over.

• by letsgo-gb on 11/20/18, 7:34 AM

  The technical questions given during an interview are not only used to see if you are competent programmer, but they are also use to see how well you communicate and how well you work in a team.

• by Osiris on 11/20/18, 5:55 AM

  I think it depends on the company and where you live. This culture may be prevalent in Silicon Valley, but less so in other places. I live in Denver and every interview process I've gone through is different.

  For one, I walked in and they handed me a laptop and a paper with a list of requirements for a REST API with some sample data and said, "We'll see you in 3 hours".

  For another, I had 5 in-person interviews, none of which included any coding, whiteboarding, quizes, etc. The closest to that was "Describe the architecture of a system you've built".

  For most, I'd say there is some amount of coding involved, but they rarely involving writing code on a whiteboard or solving a "quiz". Usually the coding I've had to do is at a computer, like pair-programming, or a project submitted ahead of time.

  "Quizes" are the reason I've never even thought about applying to any of the giants, like Google / Facebook. I don't like them either, but I don't mind showing off my coding chops.

• by boomlinde on 11/20/18, 10:54 AM

  I've personally never been quizzed for a position. I know people that have in the same general area so I don't think its consistent; I've just been lucky.

  As for adding without the + operator, a + b = a - -b :)

• by lucozade on 11/20/18, 1:24 PM

  What you're effectively saying is that, if the recruiter puts enough effort in, they can find out how good you really are.

  This is, of course, true. The problem is that that's not the problem they're trying to solve. What the recruiter is doing is finding people that have a high chance of meeting their criteria in a reasonably scalable way. Or facetiously, you may think it's about you but it's not.

  Now, most of the ways they go about this aren't actually that great. But having the recruiters running around after you will definitely be worse.

• by matell on 11/20/18, 11:29 AM

  I am freelancing via Toptal, and you have to pass the entrance exams (which are hard and include live coding), but that is the last time you have to do it... at least that is my experience with 5 different contracts in last 3 years there.. after entering, no one asked me to pass some additional quiz. The clients there seem to trust the system -- i.e. once you are in, you passed the bar and there in no need to waste time testing your abilities again.

• by adim86 on 11/20/18, 11:42 AM

  The developer evaluation process is broken, sometimes because the people hiring you do not even understand what you do and sometimes it is because what the interviewer is testing for is not properly communicated to the candidate for various reasons. The best way to get a job is to be in a developer community where you get referred to jobs and not by job searching online. This is how top-tier candidates get jobs in every industry, referrals, it cuts all the bullshit. So your goal should be to get to that level which means upping your social skills, that being said we all need to start from somewhere.

  I wrote a post about this a couple weeks ago, on the disconnection between what an employer is looking for and what you (a developer) think they want. I hope it helps someone

  http://blog.adimofunne.com/coding-interviews/

• by peterhi on 11/20/18, 12:30 PM

  Unless I have copious free time (and I don't) then I'm not going to browse 130 Github repositories and wouldn't known from Adam if they are forks or not (unless they were all created close together). Thus I cannot trust the metrics from them either

  LinkedIn, blogs - not exactly reliable sources of information given they are what you are saying about yourself. We've had candidates list the number of Instagram likes they had as if it proved anything. Sold some t-shirts on Cafepress, wow you must be an incredible developer / entrepreneur then

  I have seen some amazing code in a Github repository that the candidate couldn't explain to me. I suspect it was a joint project that someone else was a major contributor to

  So yes I will want to verify / test your abilities

  But personally I read a CV and then talk to the candidate. Worked well so far

• by jurgenwerk on 11/20/18, 9:18 AM

  Here is a repository of companies that don't force you into solving fizz buzz problems: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

• by Harkins on 11/20/18, 1:18 PM

  They also test conscientiousness.

  But, yeah, having just gone through a round of interviews I think there's a big range of quality at work in these, and passed on some companies because of how irrelevant their prompts were or unstandardized their processes were.

• by mbrodersen on 11/23/18, 2:52 AM

  In most software companies you are required, as part of your job, to communicate effectively with people who might not agree with you. That includes clients and co-workers. Including situations where things are heated and stressful. White board tests are great for finding out if you can stay level and communicate clearly in a stressful situation. Calling things stupid and slamming the door just shows you are not capable of doing a lot of real world software development jobs. Which involve a lot more than coding software.

• by CyanLite4 on 11/20/18, 1:34 PM

  For every developer that complains about a coding “quiz”, there are a dozen more candidates that have been weeded out by them.

  You’d be surprised by the number of candidates who say they are “senior software engineer” or “10 years experience as a lead developer” who still can’t do FizzBuzz. Or the ones who can do it but takes them 100 lines of code.

  I’ve also turned away candidates who didn’t want to do a simple coding test, but still wanted to work with us. Entitled people are just as damaging to a company as incompetent ones.

• by castis on 11/20/18, 12:46 PM

  Most places aren't so much looking to make sure you know things, they're looking to see _how_ you do things.

• by burnThemAll on 11/20/18, 10:33 AM

  It's all designed to fuck you over. Ignore whatever they throw at you. They're rejecting you by default, if they subject you to the quiz show.

  That's the real lesson of the coding quiz. You are rejected by default. Take aims to flunk it by default, is the natural response.

• by thecleaner on 11/20/18, 11:41 AM

  Look at it this way, how does someone verify that all the work done is by you ? Even if it is its not within everybody's range to test someone on code from 130 repositories. Just memorize the quiz nonsense, the market is asking for shit prep so give it to them.

• by johan_larson on 11/20/18, 12:25 PM

  You'd think it would be possible to create some sort of certification system so that we could prove we are clever and can code once rather than having to prove it again and again.

• by rajacombinator on 11/20/18, 6:00 PM

  I don’t mind a simple test to verify skills. But from there tech companies should be able to evaluate prior experience, which they seem to struggle with.

• by singularity2001 on 11/20/18, 11:22 AM

  Sure you can consult and if people appreciate your work they often approached you themselves about joining their work force.

• by jeffrallen on 11/20/18, 11:57 AM

  Adults find their way through the world as it is, not how they want it to be. Grow up. When you've earned a bit of freedom from the stupid gatekeepers, you can do it your own way (entrepreneurship, networking, contacting, etc). For now, pay your dues.

• by Jach on 11/20/18, 12:46 PM

  I'm a bit confused by your reference to HackerRank -- is not "extract max value without a binary search tree" a kind of problem that might show up there? Is it that type of problem you're complaining about, or the fact that you've already done enough in public that you shouldn't have to be subjected to it again time after time?

  If it's the latter, a counterpoint is that doing these sorts of tests (usually not strict pass/fail ones but ones with levels of progression or orthogonal points of detail like "handles the divide-by-zero case without it being pointed out") lets me rank candidate A and B in a consistent and arguably more fair way. Sometimes A will have lots of impressive github contributions, while B will have nothing but schoolwork to discuss. Personally I'm unwilling to automatically grant the job to A on such a basis as publicly available work artifacts, or indeed anything on their resume (such info probably made it easier to get to the interview stage, of course) so I test A and B the same way. I might expect A to do better, but I give B the chance anyway, and B sometimes does way better. If A's past work/volunteer experience isn't directly related to the jobs which they'll be asked to do, how valuable is it? I think minimal. (It may become more valuable in the future, but such hidden future utility applies just the same to B, just in likely less obvious places such as the ability to read a crypto paper and pump out exploit code in a couple days rather than a month or two.[1])

  All that said, I'd love it if I could just give (and as a candidate, receive) a certified IQ test (or perhaps the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderlic_test) and OCEAN personality test once every n years that can be reused. A lot of jobs don't require anything else but "smart and gets things done" (i.e. high enough IQ and trait conscientiousness). Maybe something fizzbuzzy in addition in order to lower job onboarding costs, though you'll find anecdotes of companies hiring smart people who couldn't program and successfully training them / otherwise supporting their education to become good programmers.

  My advice for finding a less-BS job besides the already-linked no-whiteboards repo (which is a bit suspect since I know at least one company on the list shouldn't be in general) is to find one that isn't in high competition from candidates (they're more likely to shorten the process to find someone good enough, i.e. "smart and gets things done") or one with a very defined job role (in which case they'll test you on that knowledge specifically if your public contributions don't make its presence evident rather than give the usual generic quizzes that sort of act as proxies of IQ or ability to do real non-quiz work).

  [1] https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/

• by gcb0 on 11/20/18, 5:48 AM

  no :(

• by pesheh on 11/20/18, 1:47 PM

  I'm honestly surprised by the amount of people complaining about the interviewing process. First of all, have in mind that the interviewer should have some kind of an objective measure, you need to judge all candidates the same way. There are many great developers who don't work outside of their job, so GitHub is out of the question. LinkedIn is self kept and doesn't really show your skills, just your CV. Reaching high levels in HackerRank takes a lot more time than the interviews probably, and you still have no objective way to judge candidates.

  And this is where interviews or coding problems come. They allow the interviewer to judge your ability to code and compare it to other candidates. And, probably even more importantly, your social skills, which in a team or in a relatively small company are essential.

  But... Why go through all this? Other professions don't do it, right! Well, at least in Europe, most other professions aren't even nearly as well paid as even a junior dev.