Comment by eyelidlessness | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eyelidlessness | Hacker News Reader

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That’s, in my opinion, a good thing! It helps verify the engineer can competently code—in a real codebase, which is much more valuable (again IMO) than coding in a vacuum. Eliminating that question, which is often cited as the motivation for these sorts of challenges, is a cue that the candidate is qualified for further interviewing. That being out of the way leaves room to evaluate a lot of other things by:

- enquiring about the candidate’s thoughts about the problem and their approach to solving it, on which (again IMO) this candidate would really shine; you’d likely get a much less thoughtful or thorough account from someone less experienced or talented

- ask about concerns which would be typical in real world work but often get glossed over in interviews, like how they’d approach testing and SCM and review, or even just things they’d do differently outside the interview process

- get more conversational and learn more about the actual value the candidate would potentially bring to your team/org, starting this with some greater confidence, trust and familiarity on both ends

- dive deeper on technical validation if anything in the above feels questionable

Those sorts of conversations convey much more meaningful information than any coding challenge that isn’t very focused on very specific prerequisites for the domain/role.

The ergonomics suck. Whose laptop do you use? I’d want my own. Oh they want me to use sublime? Maybe I prefer Vim with all of my macros. I’m a professional and I rely on my macros and tools. Maybe it’s a PC and I only develop on linux.

It introduces an entire problem space where you’re evaluating something that’s neither important to you or your company.

Way too many moving parts.

Filtering out prima donnas who claim they need the exact right dev environment to write out a function is another feature of this question. They’re never productive developers.

This is ableist whether you realize it or not. People tailor their dev environments to be functional and effective for them not just to cater to their whims, many of us actually need certain accommodations to be able to work and to be able to do so at our level of effectiveness.

I’m quite productive thank you. But if you stand me up in front of a whiteboard or sit me in front of an unfamiliar code editor, I’m gonna produce nothing of value. If you’re filtering me out for that: thank you, I don’t want to work for/with you either

That makes it seem like a great test, right? It detects environments with mutual lack-of-fit. You don’t want to work there. They don’t what you to work there. Outcome from experiment: both realize this.

As far as interviews go, it’s pretty good.

This is ableist too. You might be relieved to eliminate candidates who could be a great fit with some accommodation. You’re eliminating people unnecessarily, and it harms both you and the candidates.

As the originator of the question addressed elsewhere in these comments, they gave advance notice to the candidates and worked with them to provide an alternative setup as needed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31065861

The “accommodation” of having vim macros set up.

Yes, hiring is supposed to be “ableist.” I don’t want to work with or hire mentally limited people who couldn’t write a function in Notepad.

The accommodation is allowing people to use tools which allow them to be effective. The ableism is finding people “mentally limited” because they may need affordances (often but not always) physical to contribute.

Hiring is supposed to be qualifying. Qualified people using completely irrelevant-to-the-task assistive tooling is none of your fucking business. Unless the job you’re hiring for requires coding in Notepad, your expectation that interviewers do is discriminating probably illegally but definitely immorally. And probably also limiting your hiring pool in ways you don’t want.

Not a problem for me in this particular aspect, I’m never going to seek employment from you. But disadvantaging people who need accessibility tools is shitty.

I see that as being largely a non–issue. Either you use your own computer and share your screen with the interviewer, or you use a pre–prepared machine. An ideal interviewer would have three laptops ready to go, one each for Windows, OSX, and Linux, and would ask you which you prefer to use. Or three types of VMs to remote into, or whatever. (The upfront cost of that is miniscule if you’re asking a bunch of candidates this question over a few years.) If the interviewer can’t provide that much then they have failed your interview of them, and if you can’t be productive under those conditions then you will likewise fail. This is beneficial for both parties.

I think that this is actually pretty obvious to most people. Arthur only mentions this to say that getting a working build environment wasn’t part of the test.

Coding challenges in general, if they’re part of the hiring process, need to be much more accommodating yes. Even if they reassure you they’re evaluating “how you think” etc, this kind of thing is an anxiety amplifier for many (including me).

I haven’t interviewed on site with a coding challenge for nearly a decade, but last time I did I literally brought my own laptop and asked permission to use it (which was always declined). If I were interviewing today I’d literally walk out if that request wasn’t at least considered, and probably even still if it was declined without a really good explanation.

You'd be mostly reading code and writing <100 lines of C, much of which would be copypasta. I'm not convinced having the familiar editor would be that big of a deal here.

reading code (or more correctly, navigating an unfamiliar codebase) is difficult in a setup you're not used to.

I myself rely heavily on IDE click thrus and reference searches.

Purely using grep sucks, and a plain text editor's search function might also not function as smoothly. This all leads to friction.

This type of interview requires the candidate's own dev setup. If they could prepare ahead of time (e.g., give the repo to download and setup the IDE etc), then it would be fine.

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