Ask HN: Reasonable reasons to refuse coding assessments
For those of you with ~20 years of experience as engineers, how have you explained you do not do timed coding interviews? have you offered other types of assessments such as a take home instead or a walkthrough of personal code? Please share your experiences and type of company and role level for context.
31 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 93.3 ms ] threadI did pass one interview out of sheer luck. Small startup, their core person left and they had a tight deadline (i.e. waterfall). CTO asked me my opinion on architectures and stuff, I pulled out my laptop which was covering a lecture on architecture I was doing at that time. He was impressed, we agreed on culture and pay and stuff, and they offered the job the next day. One hour interview.
Interviews are two way though, and you should always evaluate that they have a competent team if they let you skip the coding interviews.
If I had one... I'd probably do it, rather than refuse. Why not? But I might also consider it in my evaluation of the company. (Remember that you're interviewing them, too...)
Maybe this changes at 20+ years of experience, but I haven't gotten that impression from my professional network.
My general philosophy about this kind of thing is that a potential employer is free to conduct the interviews in whatever way they wish. How they choose to conduct them tells me something important about the company.
If they want to do something that I am just unwilling to do (such as a take-home exercise), I'll say that outright and offer a different way they can gather the information they want. If that's not acceptable to them, then I have a decision to make: is this really a company I want to work for enough to do it anyway? If so, I shut up and do it. If not, then the interview is effectively over.
But I have always had (even when green) an attitude about interviews. I'm not looking at them as the company evaluating me, I'm looking at them as me evaluating the company.
Well said. Some companies' first ever response is a HackerRank link. without even a call. Those are effectively over immediately. That's an extreme case but one can find many red flags about a company during the interview process.
Take home exams are great because they're usually well thought, some are even paid (fixed price and non-timed. If they're strictly timed run away).
HackerRank on the other hand indicates high employee turnover, only fresh graduates, and the code is garbage.
FAANG interviews which require 6 month practice beforehand indicate mass layoffs coming soon.
Of-course the best are the ones where you have a conversation with a manager and they like you and hire you, but those are very rare.
That's basically my 10+ year experience in general. I'm not even mentioning the dirty practices such as contacting your previous employer behind your back, etc. There are lots of other signs.
I’ve had many interviews where they ask me to write out a fizzbuzz or something but that takes a few minutes. And I’ve never minded doing that.
If someone gave be a big take home, and I wanted the job, I’d probably just do it.
I currently give a small take home assignment to applicants that I designed to take 15 minutes. Few refuse. If someone proposed an alternative, I’d listen as I’m really just looking to filter out people who can’t code at all (a surprisingly large number of people).
Do you mean that people are applying to the programming job without knowing how to program?
A 15-30 minute exercise seemed like the best filter that optimized my time and the applicants.
And my exercise isn’t leetcode, nor is it timed. I just designed it so it doesn’t take a lot of time because time isn’t important for this filter.
If you went through a decent 4-year CS program you will have been required to do coding projects, so if you have NO code to show, either you went to a shit program, OR you cannot write code.
It doesn't matter if you have a github. I have lots of code and very little in github because I don't want to open source it.
I cannot imagine how someone can be a good programmer yet NEVER has written any code they can show. So did they have time to spend 6 months grinding leetcode but didn't even write a simple application? That makes no sense to me.
"I just designed it" = it makes sense to me and if anyone else is unable to understand my quirky problem then they can't write software. OK.
So my brief exercise has saved me from wasting interviews on those folks. Of course it’s not foolproof and people can have a friend write it, or use ChatGPT, or whatever. But it helps.
they all do it
Statistically speaking, would you hire a person that's good at leet code, or one that isn't?
Probably it's not directly related to what you will do at the position, but if it takes you 1 week to prepare for an interview and you can't do that, I believe that speaks a lot regarding someone's qualifications.
during an interview in my experience it is timed AND you need to give the optimal solution AND you need to talk while coding
hiring those good at leetcode will get you a team consisting of people who had the time to practice and are good at practicing. that’s it.
not passing leetcode interviews has no meaning regarding someone’s capabilities.
and BTW i am not talking about a basic for loop type problem.
And I say that as someone who decidedly belongs to the latter category.
i don’t need coding assistants
i have no time to grind leetcode
If the company thinks inverting a binary tree is the best way to test my capabilities on a completely unrelated job, that reflects poorly on them. They might as well do a push up contest.