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Comment by gruseom | Hacker News Reader

This article, and the one it links to for support, are self-refuting as far as I'm concerned. They make me think "be sure to have a coding test" if it keeps people who think like this away (specifically, people who think that they shouldn't have to try very hard and that their experience entitles them to preferential treatment).

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The author uses unfortunate wording. His claim is that requiring full applications as a part of the interview process is unnecessary. He does not claim coding itself should not be a part of the process.

He makes clear he's talking about full, to spec applications in the introduction, but he calls these "coding tests." His conclusion makes it clear he does not consider "coding tests" to be the fizzbuzz sort of questions:

For those who administer coding tests, please reconsider what you’re doing. For junior developers, they’re fabulous tools. But for anyone who has a body of code samples all ready to go, ask for one. Ask a few technical questions that require code in an interview.

Absolutely. I've interviewed many "senior" developers who couldn't complete even very basic programming tasks. They could talk your ear off about their "experience", but ask them to actually do something and they were completely lost.

Hey, that sounds like a good idea all round! It will also let experienced programmers know that they shouldn't bother applying to your shop (where their experience is not going to be recognized and valued).

They'd be right about that. Experience in and of itself counts for nothing. There are a great many programmers who have years of experience programming badly. Nor have I ever met a great programmer who cared a fig about how many years of experience they or anyone else had.

What counts is the value you can add now.

Good luck figuring out from a programming test whether someone is actually going to add value (rather than just be good at solving tests). Experience delivering quality work on time is a reasonable predictor of future success.

Wrong. It can easily be an indicator of a company (or series of companies) that doesn't want to go through the hassle of firing you.

I wrote "Experience delivering quality work on time" I didn't write "has a resume that only proves he showed for work for x number of years".

Those two look mostly the same on paper. I've looked at the linked-in profiles for people that I've worked with before. There are ones who absolutely sucked and were a net negative for the team, but who "helped deliver feature X" or "drove completion of project Y", but in fact, they probably actually delayed or at least lowered the quality bar of those very things they tout.

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