Coding tests for interviews

Ahmed Fasih posted his proposed alternative to a HackerRank pre-interview test. This sparked comments in the HN discussion.

I think it is worth approaching these kinds of tests from both sides, as this topic has come up a lot in some email lists of which I am a member.

As an employee, you want to be assured of the best chance of finding a job that is a good fit, and of minimizing the time spent to apply to each job. You also want to maximize the number of jobs you get offered, so you have optionality (“well, I’d love to work for you, company XYZ, but I’m considering other offers and was wondering if you could give me more XXX” where XXX is whatever you desire, money, time off, health care, etc).

As so many employees say in the discussion, if you are a senior person, these kinds of tests can be a bit insulting and disconnected from the actual work. Who is going to transform a 2D array in their regular job? I’d reach for a library or stack overflow answer.

On the other hand, if you are at the point where you need to fill out an online test rather than talking directly to the hiring manager about how you can solve her pain points, maybe that’s a problem? LinkedIn is pretty magical in terms of finding this info out, though of course there may be corporate protocols that make this circumvention impossible.

As an employer you want to find the best person for the price in the shortest amount of time. Where best depends on the position, but is some mix of skills, culture fit, desire for the job, and perceived amount of time they’ll stay. You also want to be fair to all applicants and have some kind of apples to apples means of comparison.

As so many managers say in the discussion, these tests weed out folks who can’t code their way out of a paper bag. If you’re a senior engineer, you’ve probably worked with some folks like that, so you can see the need. They also do so relatively quickly and in a way that scales and is equitable across different candidates.

So, as a senior engineer, I’d:

• seek employment where I could circumvent these types of tests through my network
• avoid these types of employers unless it was a great job
• if I had to take the test, try to have sympathy with the employer and take it as an opportunity to brush up on my algorithms

And if I were the employer, I’d think about these tests are a filter. Just like a GitHub profile, they’ll give you some information. Whether that information is relevant to the current candidate search, and is worth filtering out good candidates who don’t bother filling out tests, is an exercise left for the reader.