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Comment by novaleaf | Hacker News Reader

I was offered to interview at a company, they wanted me to do a coding "pre-screening" which consisted of creating a full-stack, and fully operational registration website from scratch.

Maybe I'm a super slow architect and developer, but I'd estimate that to be a greater than 8 hour time commitment.

I assume that the org's leadership acted in good faith, that someone honestly think's a non-slapdash solution would be a couple hours of work. It boggles my mind.

And yes, I declined their invitation to pre-screen and thus did not complete the interview process.

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Depends which framework you pick for the solution. Using Django what you propose is doable within an hour.

a nodejs solution was the requirement, but maybe if the org's leadership was comming from a Python/php background they might assume using a scafolding was a given. I don't know anything like django for nodejs though!

isn't express.js kind of like a django for node?

No, Express is much closer to Flask than Django. One of my biggest gripes with Node is that there's really no equivalent to Django/Rails in terms of developer productivity and best practices.

Ember? Sails?

Ember is not a server-side framework.

Sails is leagues behind Django in terms of everything from tooling to quality.

I thought Ember had isomorphism now...

Server-side rendering ("isomorphism") does not make a framework into a server-side framework. Ember is not designed to be a backend for your application.

cough https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12633191

Sorry, I'm not sure how that's relevant to my comment? I personally love the diversity of the JS ecosystem, but that doesn't have any bearing on the fact that Ember is simply not a backend framework.

Meteor

Meteor is not at all equivalent to Django. I've used both, and they're leagues apart. Meteor still can't even use SQL.

If you choose Meteor, it's going to dictate your entire stack from database to frontend framework. That's fine if what you really want is an all-in-one solution but it's definitely not a Django equivalent.

That's what gives Express its appeal. Rather than a walled in environment, I can pick and choose the pieces that I need. Much more flexible if you want to move over to a different library within Express.

I understand that's why people think Express is great, but in practice you end up rebuilding a lot of the same functionality. It can work okay in a microservices architecture, but in the end you have to reinvent a lot of the wheel.

There's also a common misconception that Django is a "walled in" environment. It provides sensible default utilities for everything, but you actually don't need to use them at all. For example, you can bring anything from your own template engine to your own ORM if you want to.

Not sure what wheels I'm reinventing, I just choose to include the libraries that are correct for the application.

If I don't use half the stuff Django is offering me, only to bring in my own. Aren't we back to the same place?

The difference is that the Django ecosystem really focuses on developer productivity and has strong best practices. Look at 5 different Express apps and you'll find 5 different ways of structuring models, controllers, and routes.

Plus the fact that Django has some suggested defaults allows you to be very productive with them. For example, I really haven't found any equivalent to DRF for Express.

I want to make it clear I'm not some Node hater. Probably half my projects are still in Node, but I do know I'm much high productivity in Django.

So really all we're seeking here is a standard for application layout. I really really dislike being forced into some heavy handed framework, not that Django is that, but it's on the topic of discussion.

Express + Passport can easily be done in less than an hour. It's super simple to setup. I've got my default template for every site I whip up. Now writing that from scratch is a completely different story. I doubt any of their current engineers could just put that together in a day.

With something like cookiecutter-django a registration site takes about 5 minutes.

https://github.com/pydanny/cookiecutter-django

Just to confirm, you meant just register -> store to database + forgot password and validation right? (Greater than 8 hour time commitment do sound about right, but I'm just curious to make sure I read it correctly).

The instructions did not give an upper bound in terms of functional requirements, though the lower bound of "realistic use" was given!

So yes, I would assume that includes things like full email validation round-trip too.

Even just slopping together an in-memory, no-email-sent deployed solution is at least 3 or 4 hours in my book, which seems way excessive for a pre-screening question!

And you had to do that from scratch? No libraries allowed? That does seem rough. With libraries allowed you could probably spin something up with rails + scaffolding + devise though.

maybe libraries are allowed, but I don't know any that can really turn this into a 30 minute project. And even researching libraries is hours of work :) If you have any suggestions for this on nodejs, I'll be happy to add it to my interviewing toolbelt :D

Cookie cutter Django. 30 mins seems on the high side.

Even if that were allowed as a solution, it is still a terrible prescreen interview task.

Depending upon whether or not you can use pre-existing frameworks/libraries they are either asking you to: 1) do something which takes so much work that it is completely unreasonable as a prescreen (which will filter out good programmers, who won't deal with that shit), or 2) they are asking you to basically edit some templates on top of some off-the-shelf solution (which will not filter out bad programmers).

I don't disagree at all, was just poining out it could be done :)

Coding to even talk to someone is a terrible idea.

Sorry for the late reply, Just noticed your comment. I don't know a way to do it in node. If you have setup devise a few times recently you could possibly get it done with ROR + the devise gem + scaffolding. This is a pretty terrible interview question though, as testing if someone has practiced a canned solution ( which is really all you could do in that time) doesn't seem that great, and actually taking the time to make your own solution would take much longer and an 8 hour unpaid interview question also seems bad </rambling>.

What about user editable profiles with the associated valudations on email change ;)

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