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> For most of the hiring funnel you want to evaluate everyone the same way so that you can compare each candidate apples-to-apples and so the hiring team builds expertise in the interview process

That is a great point! Similar to admissions tests to a college I suppose.

> Their activity might be mostly in a natural language you don't understand, and how could you evaluate that fairly?

Good point as well.

> That said if a candidate provides their GitHub or other portfolio then I think you should consider it just like any other part of their resume, not to replace the coding challenges but as part of the chat about past experience.

I think I understand. Would it be fair to say that, you consider the the "score" of the coding exercises as weighted higher than potentially significant contributions and maintenance of open source projects _because_ they are normalized?

I don't think anything can substitute for actually passing at least a small test. In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUP7U5vTMM0 Gordon Ramsey says he asks new cooks to make scrambled eggs, and if they can make a good scrambled egg, he knows they can cook. It's like that, anyone can talk a big game but at the end of the day you can either make good eggs on demand or you can't. You can either write the function that produces the specified output or you can't.

A surprising proportion of applicants, with plausible-looking CVs, cannot write code to calculate the mean of a bunch of numbers. They spend most of the interview on what is meant to be a 30-seconds-long relax, have a laugh and move on question. Many apply through agencies, and the agents know I ask this question and I know they give the candidates a preparation pack and this does not help.

I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

I've been lucky enough not to have seen that happen, though I have seen at least one candidate tragically fall apart on a more complex question, and that can be painful for everyone.

Why do you keep using these agencies that send you unqualified candidates?

Also, I think the better way to structure coding challenges is as a series of increasingly difficult problems that build on each other. If the candidate gets stuck on the easier problems, you can just quietly ignore the later ones. It feels very risky to start an interview with something like "Okay, hah, here's a real simple one to get us started," because if they fall apart there because of nerves or something, they will not recover in time. What do you think?

> Why do you keep using these agencies that send you unqualified candidates?

Corporate politics.

> as a series of increasingly difficult problems that build on each other.

...I mean, that's exactly how I structure these. When a candidate is stuck on the very first one of the series, though, and spends the entire interview on it... I think that's a fail. What do you think?

Asking someone to calculate the mean of a group of numbers is so basic that it's admitting that your prescreening process to that point is broken. I hope we're talking about Zoom interviews and you're not actually bringing people into a physical location before asking that question.

Assuming your process isn't broken, there's a psychological risk to asking a qualified person a question that is excruciatingly basic. If they know it's a question only a fool or liar would get wrong, then a momentary blank can lead to an anxiety spiral. I think even the first question should be plausibly challenging.

I also don't understand why you're letting someone spin out for an entire interview on a simple question. Are we talking like half an hour or more? Maybe just let them try for a couple minutes and then pull back, give them a breather if they look stressed, and gently confirm that they've done actual hands-on programming in the past. Maybe their bootcamp misled them, or their previous job was a project manager sort of thing. Bad fit, sorry we didn't catch this earlier, best of luck to you.

This is only true if your hiring team sucks. Assuming the candidate isn't intentionally trying to cheat, I can tell in less than one hour their programming strength only by looking at their GitHub repo(s). Any very strong programmer can do this. The reason companies don't do this is because they contain only weak programmers and/or they value factors other than programming strength higher.

Since devrob asked the question and they link to their github in their HN profile, I took five minutes to check it out. Don't want to spend time making a full evaluation, but it is obvious that devrob's strength is at least above average.

It's about making it clear what you want as an employer and hiring fairly. Employers should decide on whatever (legal) requirements they want candidates to have and then hire the first person who comes into the funnel who meets those requirements, allowing for tiebreakers. At most places that aren't doing groundbreaking work this will just be N years of professional development experience and being comfortable with X and Y technologies. If you want to be more complex you can create a rubric including years of experience, the score on a take-home project, GitHub activity or anything else.

It takes a strong hiring team to do it this way, knowing what they want and making decisions based on rules they've set for themselves. Weak teams will go by gut feelings, ego, random quiz questions, stuff like that. Put it this way, they say you don't really understand something unless you can teach it to someone else. You said you can evaluate programming strength within an hour. Could you teach someone else, or put down in writing, how to do that consistently? That's what I'm saying hiring teams should do.

You take the department's three strongest programmers and have them browse through the candidate's github (or equivalent code sharing site) for an hour and then grade them on a scale from 1 to 5. Candidates without github get zero points. Hire the candidates with the highest average score. It's that easy. The problem for most companies is that they don't know who their strongest programmers are.

leetcode is skewed toward people who have the time and energy to endlessly grind and practice until they can answer your irrelevant cute coding trick question in under 2 minutes.

there, you see what I did? none of what you wrote above makes any sense.

I rather spend my time developing IP instead of repetitive leetcode practicing. either will take you several months, but the former will result in an asset which you own the rights to and can monetize.

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but yes, requiring LeetCode mastery also skews hiring in the same direction.