May I take a moment to vent about how coding challenges in no-way are indicative of your ability to create great apps or your worth as a developer. I'm writing my story to help any devs here that are currently trying to land a job and also to support you by saying "you're good enough!"
Big long sigh...
Just a bit of context
I've been making websites and web apps using WordPress for about 10 years and a couple years ago I completed a coding bootcamp mainly focused on the MERN stack (which I love:) The past 3 years I've had a job as a state government web developer/project manager. A couple months ago I also passed the AWS Certified Developer Exam on my first attempt. Finally last month my small band of developers and I deployed a state-wide full stack python app totally delivered on AWS.
I really like my job and the people I work with but have pretty much gone as far as I can go with advancing my career due to the very flat org chart here. The next level up is CTO! (which I served as Interim CTO when my boss got canned.)
Decision Time
I decided to shop the market for new jobs focused on my skillset, passion and work experience. I found the world needs you and I more than ever! Which is a very good thing!
A recruiter hit me up on Linkedin and told me about a SDE role at a great company I have interest in working for. She tells me how I'm underpaid at my current job and how this company would love to have someone with my background on their team. Sounds great right!? So I jumped at it and we scheduled the tech interview and I took a week off work to crack the coding interview.
Prep Time
Maybe it's me being naive; but I've been on several coding interviews and when I hear: "2 questions, 1 hour" that tells me these will be moderately-difficult questions. I'm preparing for: memoized fibonacci series, recursive array chunking, palindrome arrays, pyramids, anagrams, maxChars, steps and even brushed up on data structures and runtime complexity theory for possible questions on refactoring. I'm confident in my ability to solve these and similar problems using CoderPad.
Interview Time
For my interview I'm paired with one of their senior SDE's which is great and we start the CoderPad session. What happens next made me cringe...
I'm asked my preferred language and I reply "JavaScript please" He replies great! Here's your first question...
The infamous MagicFunction code challenge
I take a big gulp and start to work my way the best I can through the question and type out ideas for a possible algorithm to solve this beast. My interviewer isn't a totally sadistic as he tries to help me solve the problem but we end up leaving it unsolved and move on to the the next problem and tells me "not many people are able to solve this question during the interview".
My next question wasn't that much better: "Create a program that can take in any number of arguments and returns a sentence that contains an integer 1 - 9 in order on each word at position [1]. A function call would result in 't1e h2use i3 o4 t5e r6ght'..." My immediate thought while trying to type my possible algorithm is "why would I make a program to do this?" Shouldn't I be trying to strip the digits from the string?? and lastly what kinda of JS sorcery would I need to invoke to solve this problem. Needless to say I didn't solve this problem either.
These are not real world problems that we as Devs solve. When would we ever have a valid use case where we'd say: "this needs a magic function". I can vaguely see a business use case for creating data that contains chars and integers in specific positions but still not a real world application in today's marketplace.
Wrapping up the interview
After this I ask my interviewer "tell me about yesterday?" so I could get a feel for the types of problems he solves or features he's working on. My interviewer tells me that he's working on a partial payment order feature for a create-react app!!! I've done partial payments before on a couple e-commerce websites in the past and could have provided some logical pointers. I go on to show examples of my work, projects in production and the details behind them.
I hope some good companies read this post and stop asking interviewees to solve random problems that have no IRL business relevance. Sure coding challenges display your depth of programming knowledge and ninja skills but what do you gain by hiring a dev that can solve arbitrary code challenges and no IRL challenges?
Needless to say I got a rejection email the next day. This didn't destroy my confidence and I'm alive and coding today. I did fight "imposter syndrome" for a couple hours afterwards; but that's to be expected after a train wreck interview.
I'll keep trying to reach my goal as a well-paid SDE at a prominent company and won't stop until I do! If you ever find yourself bombing a coding interview just remember that you are "good enough" and you're already making some pretty cool apps. Don't sweat it and live to code another day. Best of luck on your next interview, I'm rooting for you!!
Top comments (4)
Thanks so much for sharing this experience. Your point regarding the gap between tech interview questions and IRL applications is a very good one. I feel pretty sure that in passing you up due to this gap, this company missed out on hiring a developer who would have added a great deal of value to their team. IRL experience > "dog-and-pony show" any time. Best wishes as you continue your search for the company that deserves you!
Thank you Stephanie for your time and kindness! The "dog and pony shows" create a disconnect that marginalize a great number of good devs. Nonetheless, we have to learn to clear these "jumps and hurdles" to reach our goals. Thanks again
Thanks for sharing. Could you elaborate on the second problem? I didn't quite understand that. Are the words the arguments? After the 9 was used does it start at 1 again? I'd like to brush up on my interviewing as well 😊
Thanks Patrick for your time. I wish I could give you more info on this question, but I was lost on it. I'm trying to search around for a similar coding challenge. If I find one, I'll definitely do a follow up post with the questions.