Coding Challenges for Jobs is a joke

Koire — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 08:04:01 +0000

Coding Challenges are a Joke

Part two-ish of my trials to blog about my job search.

The Premise

You have a good interview with a company and it goes well, you like what they're doing, they seem to like you. So, step two, you have a new interview about engineering. They might throw some hardball questions, like when should you use eventually consistent vs traditional sql; how do they scale? Or useEffect, useMemo, useRef, what are these things? But, you know all of that of course!!

Now, (luckily it's after the two interviews) they give you a take home coding challenge... Which, well, at least it's take home. They say it's only 2 hours and don't worry about complicated code... Here's the challenge (for front-end):

  Use a free api like wikipedia. 
    - Create a search page that allows the user to search the api
    - The user should also be able to favorite the results, and see them later, using whatever storage option you deem fitting.
    - The user should be able to click on the result and get a summary

  Tips:
    - Spend some time on transitions/animations that make an app nice to use
    - Focus on good naming
    - If you end up with complex code, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, document the thoughts behind it

Not too terribly hard, but definitely not two hours if I should pay attention to transitions/animations

Write it with ESM, modern JS, and CSS.

I used Animate Style and Water CSS and about 100 lines of JavaScript all nicely separated into modules using import.

Feedback:

it seems you didn't use a library, therefore it won't run on browsers that are not supported by es6
the pure javascript was a bit legacy with a low readability
they feel you might have misunderstood the instructions of the coding assignment, as your actual project was not written in pure javascript

for anyone who read this far, feel free to judge me.

You can judge me here and view the semi-finished product here:

Tired of code tests

Koire — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 06:10:36 +0000

This is my first post on Dev.to, I haven't been able to tie my coding work with my professional work, I've worked at a big telecom company in Japan for 10 years, so they own all of my code.

You'd think, having a title like "Tech Lead" or "Engineering lead" and making presentations, mentoring new employees who just joined with almost no knowledge would weigh in when looking for new jobs.

I always feel an like imposter everyday, but just this week, we ran into a problem that seriously last year me made a backup, made a policy and documented it.

So, I don't know where I'm going with this, I have a new boss who only cares how many commits or pull requests, or code reviews I have. So, I want to change my job. But so many companies want to see if I can balance a btree(isn't that solved already?)

And, I can't share my source code over the years, which is just basically cutting me off.

Sorry My first and maybe only post here is ending sad and negative.

This industry, we work to solve problems but don't usually have a way to carry the proof we did anything, and then we're tested with random questions that almost never have any relation to our work.

sorry, not sorry, things need to change. (but I'm going to leetcode right now for an interview)