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Comment by 908B64B197 | Hacker News Reader

> They’re very seldom representative of real work, and have more value for helping big companies avoid lawsuits than helping anyone else evaluate candidates or prospective jobs.

The point of a coding interview is to eliminate, as fast as possible, people who simply can't code. I'm being completely serious here. They can even have a CS degree (or will claim to but if you look closely they were in an easier program to get into and took CS electives) but cannot write a simple program on the board in an hour.

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Programmers don't write code on whiteboards.

If it was just a matter of determining if they can code or not references and prior work should be sufficient.

The real reason they exist is to filter for culture fit without having deal with the associated law suits if this was done outright.

> The point of a coding interview is to eliminate, as fast as possible, people who simply can't code.

I sincerely don’t believe this is true or that there’s any supporting evidence for it besides people repeating it. The point is to eliminate employment discrimination claims for large companies and this is what baseline they established to support the claim.

The point for everyone else is: we have too much to do, figuring out how to interview effectively and fairly is too much more work. Let’s use what everyone else uses.

I always thought the point of the coding interview was to promote a meritocracy, if you can do the job then you can have it. Fuck your "credentials" and the class you were born in, just be able to perform the job.

Now they very much care about your credentials and the way you got those credentials, but also jump through these extra hoops. No doctor, lawyer, nurse, etc is asked to do this asinine shit in their interviews (and yes, an RN in the bay area can bring in 200k/year...I know some).

What started out as a great idea has turned into an even more employer-centric way to sort the working class.

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