Most coding challenges are stupid. You’ll have a job that’s just working on a basic ass API in front of the database, and they’ll be like “can you solve the traveling salesman problem?”. You don’t need to know if I can pull fancy algorithms out of my ass. You need to know if I can cover the basics and take feedback.
Though the last code challenge I had was “can you remove duplicates from this list of integers?”. I was like, "can I just convert it to a set?’ and they were like “…ok”. Didn’t get the role, but the pay was bad, it was in office, the company is surprisingly politically conservative, and they’re rewriting their codebase “to support AI development”. So maybe that sas for the best.
No joke, when we do interviews we have candidates give code review feedback. One of the pieces of code is a poorly written but functional “find the unique numbers” function. We have had ONE candidate say, “Just throw them in a set.” And in our separate chat where we discuss candidates, we were like, “Finally someone gave the right answer.”
(Not that there’s a wrong answer when code reviewing like this, but I was waiting for someone to come to that solution.)
Our interview process has the candidate implement a couple (extremely simplistic) API routes, with the specific approach left up to the candidate. It’s more about having something they can talk through and evolve than it is about us looking for any specific approach.
Basically it exists as a way for us to have a starting point for talking about scalability topics, asking the candidate how they would evolve their implementation as we scale up the system. Does a pretty good job of giving us an idea of how they think through system design problems.
Most coding challenges are stupid. You’ll have a job that’s just working on a basic ass API in front of the database, and they’ll be like “can you solve the traveling salesman problem?”. You don’t need to know if I can pull fancy algorithms out of my ass. You need to know if I can cover the basics and take feedback.
Though the last code challenge I had was “can you remove duplicates from this list of integers?”. I was like, "can I just convert it to a set?’ and they were like “…ok”. Didn’t get the role, but the pay was bad, it was in office, the company is surprisingly politically conservative, and they’re rewriting their codebase “to support AI development”. So maybe that sas for the best.
No joke, when we do interviews we have candidates give code review feedback. One of the pieces of code is a poorly written but functional “find the unique numbers” function. We have had ONE candidate say, “Just throw them in a set.” And in our separate chat where we discuss candidates, we were like, “Finally someone gave the right answer.”
(Not that there’s a wrong answer when code reviewing like this, but I was waiting for someone to come to that solution.)
Lol “can i just convert it to a set”.
I imagine someone felt really smart for finding that question and you just ruined their day.
Our interview process has the candidate implement a couple (extremely simplistic) API routes, with the specific approach left up to the candidate. It’s more about having something they can talk through and evolve than it is about us looking for any specific approach.
Basically it exists as a way for us to have a starting point for talking about scalability topics, asking the candidate how they would evolve their implementation as we scale up the system. Does a pretty good job of giving us an idea of how they think through system design problems.