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Comment by apthnz | Hacker News Reader

As someone starting to teach myself how to code, I'd be interested to hear more about the basic coding tasks people are failing at.

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As someone else who have hired developers I agree with the parent post here.

Examples include:

- totally oblivious to standard library for the language/frameworks, reimplementing the most basic things (poorly)

- even after a 3 year CS education, lacks basic understanding of object-oriented programming/class hierarchies

- has trouble implementing even simple if/else-conditions without help

I’m talking really basic stuff here. You’d be surprised. I assume that if you are self-taught, you have the interest and because of that already much more knowledge than many graduates.

The if/else part is really astonishing. The other ones I can understand in SOME way but the if/else is logic that's used in every day life. If I do this then that will happen, otherwise this other thing may happen. Very surprising.

"The other ones I can understand in SOME way"

Not me, "OOP class hierarchys" still incomprehensible gibberish here.

We have a pre-interview test that is basically "use flickr's api to show some pictures", with a few details about how the pictures are sized and arranged. Applicants that have gone to bootcamps and even college frequently fail this miserably. Many of the rest fail to understand the details. We even had one use a completely different end point than the one specified by URL to the documentation. Some have just given up and turned nothing in, or something that they admitted didn't work.

These are candidates that we liked their resume enough to give them a shot, not just anyone who applied.

I think teaching is a bit behind on the rest api thing, probably isn’t specifically taught. Doesn’t mean they couldn’t learn it.

Why do you refuse to mentor a few of them? /s

That's, errr, a very high bar you got there.

People got it working, showing they can code just fine, and you fail them because they got some details wrong?

If you have only one or two positions open, have no trouble finding applicants, why not give a test that has a 5% pass rate if that means you end up with 6 people to choose from and still have to turn people away? What would the advantage be of making it easier just so you would have to review and turn even more people away?

We aren't looking for someone that has to be told repeatedly to read the entire ticket and actually do everything in it. We're looking for detail-oriented people.

And we find them. It's so much easier to work with them.

that's a super regular bar that anyone who's moderately able to program or learn new things should be able to jump over easily. details are important in a technical field.

For me it would be lack of intuition / imagination for building software.

Some people just cannot come up with a high level idea of a solution. Many of them immediately jumps into code, even worse so it's usually some UI code.

I gave a little writeup to a sibling comment, PTAL.

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