this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
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What I’m about to say might come off as smug. I don’t mean it to be a flex, it’s just for context.
I’ve been programming since i was 6 years old, and have 26 years of continuous professional experience. 30 years of open source contributions. You are almost definitely interacting with code I wrote on a daily basis.
7 years ago I was caught up in a round of layoffs and I was scouting around for jobs. I got an interview at a startup - it wasn’t a huge tech challenge, but I needed a job.
I did an initial technical interview with the tech lead for the company. All went great. I did a “final HR interview” , again great. Then the CTO stepped in and said that he would need me to complete a coding test before I could be hired.
I failed that live coding test despite producing code that outperformed the code in the “correct” solution by several orders of magnitude.
The CTO was clearly upset by my solution, which he got very angry about and insisted was wrong, without explanation, and despite it beating the spec and passing all the predefined tests.
2 days later the tech lead, who was also present in the test, told me there was nothing wrong with my code. Better still they had actually taken it and put in into production in place of the code that CTO had written, and which was the basis of the “correct” solution.
He also told me that he’d quit after an argument with the CTO about this and asked if I found a good place to work, if I’d let him know.
Sometimes tests are not about what you can do, but how smart they make the person testing you look.
I've been coding since I was around 12. I've been doing it for around three decades now...
On the opposite side of the spectrum, I work for a company that has a pretty strick no assholes policy. We've passed on a number of "rock stars" because we knew how personally toxic they were to a team. I do some of the culture fit (which we do first) and tech interviews.
We don't care all that much if you get it right or wrong. I mean if it's all wrong and the candidate has no clue why sure. But sometimes candidates get stressed out being on display, being pressed for time, trying to come up with the most optimized answer instead of just completing. If it's all wrong and the candidate can tell me exactly why and what they'd need to do to get it right, that's mostly a pass for us.
Ultimately wanna see a) how you think, what is your thought process and b) that you can grow.
That sounds like a very sane and sensible way to behave.