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Comment by Null-Set | Hacker News Reader

Now you can tell applicants that yes they will be coding on a laptop during the interview.

Yes and that's when I walk out of your interview. Some time ago I did an interview with elementary coding questions, like 2nd year of university stuff. Was a developer with 15 years of experience. Rage quit. They're like oh, you got 100% percent on the stuff you attempted, here is a new link to finish it. And I am like no thanks, have contract work, please send it my way. Not interested at a job at a place that interviews like this.

While I dislike most programmer interviews for asking obscure or trick questions, what's wrong with them having a baseline set of coding questions? You might have 15 years of programming experience, but people lie on their resume all the time, and a lot of management positions in this space are hands off (and the manager's skills degrade/are for the wrong tech').

I certainly have a few managers with 20+ years of experience who cannot code a Hello World site in our primary technology. Their resume will still list them as "Senior Development Manager."

PS - My managers are actually very good at their respective jobs, they just aren't hands on anymore. I am just saying that if they moved jobs their resume would be "misleading."

A manager doesn't need to know how to write a Hello World. It can be useful for a manager to have technical knowledge but purely for managing wetware (i.e. humans/programmers) it isn't required.

I've met several 10+ years developers that couldn't code basic stuff, why instead of rage quitting you did not say "I don't want sound cocky but this stuff is really easy for me, do you have anything else?" by rage quitting I wouldn't trust you contract work, what would prevent you from rage quitting in a different scenario!?

I agree wholeheartedly. On the flip side, when I interview such candidates, I usually prefix baseline questions with "This is probably a piece of cake for someone of your calibre, but please bear with me because it's a part of the process we got to get out of the way"

A clear indication of process over people.

You gotta weed people who can't code somehow.

I didn't expect to get any contract work out of that. I wanted to simply send them a message. Maybe they got it, maybe they did not. But I don't want to work for people like that. And this was the guy I would be working under testing, so if he thinks that this is a good test, then I don't think that this is a good job.

Developers complain all the time about these stupid tests. But they do nothing about it. Do something about it, maybe something will change. And they will stop testing stupidly.

Half of developers complain about these stupid tests. The rest complain about working with people who can't pass them. The industry is full of people who don't belong, and your record isn't meaningful unless your references are people I personally know and trust.

Whatever, businesses hire other businesses routinely based on a conversation and a handshake. I expect the same sort of respect from businesses I work for as an employee. They can find some other peon to work for them, I have standards just like they have theirs. Not trying to sound arrogant, but my best customers have been those that hired me on the basis above, as another business owner. People who think you are an employee treat you quite a bit differently.

And businesses routinely get ripped off for that kind of recklessness. I've had to deliver the bad news to management about a body shop who obviously hadn't learned C++ yet because their deliverables were full of syntax errors they were asking us how to fix.

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