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Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

This article describes everything that's wrong with tech hiring these days. There is zero evidence that success on these arbitrary programming riddles have any correlation with success on the job, and yet we force candidates through a gauntlet of completely unrealistic brain teasers solving problems that they will literally never have to solve on the job.

I've recently completed half a dozen 2-4 hour coding challenges, gotten a perfect score according to the tests provided, and after a couple of weeks, gotten a boilerplate rejection email.

What's the point?

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i agree. this solution is to clever for its own good. but those requirements were essentially asking for a clever solution. if the challenge can't be solved without being clever then it is the wrong challenge.

this interview tells me that the candidate is smart and knows typescript well, but it doesn't tell me if they can write code that is clear enough so that a junior can understand and modify it. because the latter is the reality of work. a year from now, a junior will be asked to adapt this code to say replace 3 with 7 or something like that, and they will probably not be able to it without having to rewrite all of it from scratch.

How much of the article did you read? They were looking for a senior, with more than twice the experience the poster has. Being able to pump out algos is only part of the job.

While there a solution is clever, it’s not terribly maintainable and likely didn’t fit the bill.

Beyond that, things like soft skills matter for senior roles. The author can write, there’s no denying that, but we don’t know how well they can explain the why of their solution. It’s very likely the interviewers wanted more traditional functions that were unit-testable.

>While there a solution is clever, it’s not terribly maintainable and likely didn’t fit the bill.

Why invite him then?

>Beyond that, things like soft skills matter for senior roles.

Then talk. Ask him. Psychoanalysis of the solution of a stupid brain teaser will not answer your questions.

I feel like there’s a disconnect in this thread. The things I mentioned are pretty standard fare.

If you don’t mind me asking, are you a senior level engineer?

Somebody was interviewing somewhere else and they played a man-in-the-middle attack on you? :-)

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