this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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[–] [email protected] 77 points 1 month ago (9 children)

Not in any way a new phenomenon, there's a reason fizzbuzz was invented, there's been a steady stream of CS graduates who can't code their way out of a wet paper bag ever since the profession hit the mainstream.

Actually fucking interview your candidates, especially if you're sourcing candidates from a country with for-profit education and/or rote learning cultures, both of which suck when it comes to failing people who didn't learn anything. No BS coding tests go for "explain this code to me" kind of stuff, worst case they can understand code but suck at producing it, that's still prime QA material right there.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 month ago (8 children)

We do two "code challenges":

  1. Very simple, many are done in 5 min; this just weeds out the incompetent applicants, and 90% of the code is written (i.e. simulate working in an existing codebase)
  2. Ambiguous requirements, the point is to ask questions, and we actually have different branches depending on assumptions they made (to challenge their assumptions); i.e. simulate building a solution with product team

The first is in the first round, the second is in the technical interview. Neither are difficult, and we provide any equations they'll need.

It's much more important that they can reason about requirements than code something quick, because life won't give you firm requirements, and we don't want a ton of back and forth with product team if we can avoid it, so we need to catch most of that at the start.

In short, we're looking for actual software engineers, not code monkeys.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

Most hiring managers are looking for unicorns

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