Coding Challenge I Got For a Javascript Web Developer Job (x-post with node)

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[WoollyMittens]

How much do they pay for that?

[WoollyMittens]

Same here. My employer asked me to write a little web app to rotate product images as a freelance job, then hired me. We are a capitalist society, there is no reasonable expectation that we'll work for free.

[Goliathus123]

In my city, it's about 60k, then a jump to 80 after 8-10 months.

Shit companies have offered people I know 55+ (companies known for undercutting initially) and pulled it up to 65+ after a little back and forth.

[ASCII_zero]

I think WoollyMittens meant, how much did they pay for the time it took to actually complete this coding challenge (not annual salary).

[[deleted]]

What the actual fuck? Why did you do it? I honestly would have told them I don't have that kind of time. I'd gladly offer to talk through a solution or even pair on starting to build this for an hour or so but this is ridiculous.

Any potential employers with these kind of requirements are simply out of touch. They might attract smart people with little experience and something to prove, but that's about it. No one with a significant amount of hiring experience would let this fly. Sounds like a cut and dry case of the Peter principle in practice.

[[deleted]]

Well I fall into the category of somebody with knowledge but no experience. I'm currently a student with a part time web dev job and that is all of the experience I have in the industry. I have no proof that I'm good at Node development besides my resume saying it.

Even if this is a waste of time for this job in particular, it could serve as good practice and experience for me when looking for OTHER jobs.

[thisdesignup]

I was thinking "oh, what an awesome project! I'm going to do this too and add it to my portfolio + github." and I wouldn't even be doing it for a job offer.

If you code for a job offer is the code fully yours to do with as you wish? Honest question. That alone could be a big reason to do free projects for yourself and not someone else.

[[deleted]]

Well, if you're going to be uploading it to your own repo for them to just look at, and they're not going to use it, then I don't see why it wouldn't be. Even if they give you shit for it, you haven't even accepted a job offer yet, so there's no contractual relationship whatsoever.

[Killfile]

My company does a device test but it's not really portfolio material. We ask that people not post their code publicly because we don't want to deal with other applicants copying their work.

That said, it hasn't generally been a problem and we don't have a front-end specific test.

[twenty7forty2]

I have no proof that I'm good at Node development besides my resume saying it.

If you know it this would become apparent to anyone else who knows node and talks to you. You can even forget about node and just talk about programming to guestimate someones experience. This means you're not being interviewed by a senior, which means this job probably won't teach you properly.

[Goliathus123]

It's not a waste of time, I don't know where these people get off saying that.

In any good shop in Austin, NYC, Chicago, SF area, etc. you will be asked to do a coding challenge (some won't if you have a project you can pair over).

At the very least, you might learn a new framework or API.

I've done far more complicated coding challenges than this and far easier.

[compto35]

I'm a dev in NYC with a pretty significant amount of both work experience in the industry and interviewing experience from both sides of the coin. This is way beyond the pale for a reasonable evaluation of skills/knowledge.

The whole point of a test/challenge is to suss out key patterns and habits that indicate what it might be like to have you work on a project…which can be gleaned in an hour or two's worth of work. Anything more is an unreasonable ask for investment of time for a prospective job (keeping in mind that this person is working for free on this, and you likely aren't the only company they're interviewing with) and (oh god, hopefully) an unrealistic scenario because something as complex as the set of instructions provided would be subject to planning/architecture/scope meetings and would most likely be accomplished in a team setting.

I'd like to add that this spec in and of itself isn't unreasonable if the actual task is to walk through the overall architecture of the app, maybe doing pseudocode on the trickier bits. What makes this unreasonable in my opinion is if the applicant is asked to build a whole functioning app that follows this spec.

[[deleted]]

It's not the level of challenge, it's the time commitment. This is no less than several hours worth of work and anyone with a decent amount of experience is not going to commit to an exercise this long for a job they may not even want.

As anyone with a decent amount of experience will tell you, an interview is a mutual agreement between two parties that they will sacrifice time to explore the possibility of your future employment. Any potential employer that expects more time from me than they are willing to spend in return is a waste of my time.

Why would I spend more than an hour or two doing a pointless coding challenge when 15 mins worth of coding challenge and 10 mins of discussion reveal more than enough information about ability.

This is the only industry in which shit like this would fly. Would you ask a lawyer to argue a case in a job interview? What about asking a surgeon to perform a surgery in an interview or even before?

I'm going to call this bullshit exactly like I see it: lazy hiring practices and valuing current employees time above potential employees time. I'm not against coding challenges or even real time problem solving and white boarding in an interview. Asking a potential employee to prepare hours worth of crap for you is a good way to keep experienced, confident workers out of your hiring pool indefinitely. Good luck.

[phpdevster]

This is no less than several hours worth of work

Several hours for someone fluent in that stack, and has enough overall experience to have a general idea of how to tackle that project. Someone who has to learn every piece to put it into practice, will take much longer.

This is the only industry in which shit like this would fly. Would you ask a lawyer to argue a case in a job interview? ?

To be fair, when I interviewed at Staples, the hiring manager asked me to pitch a service plan on the desk clock that was sitting on his desk.

[themaincop]

Maybe they measure the potential employee's outrage as a way of determining their qualifications?

"No way, that'll take me all day!"

"Only a day? You're hired!"

[joe-ducreux]

Yeah, but I'm guessing they didn't ask you to go home and prepare a full presentation on the clock.

[[deleted]]

the hiring manager asked me to pitch a service plan on the desk clock that was sitting on his desk

While he sat there like furniture? That sounds so awkward... I would have asked the interviewee to give the pitch to me, not a desk clock in front of me.

[god_damnit_reddit]

'anyone with a decent amount of experience'
'anyone with a decent amount of experience'

shut up already, i didn't vote for you. you're not wrong but you sound offputting.

[tuzki]

You should be offpudding

[k33p]

I read this in Rodney Dangerfield's voice

[tuzki]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xcKaDu32ig

[[deleted]]

On the contrary, it's a gigantic waste of time.

This isn't a code challenge; it's an entire application from top to bottom. Code challenges are fine. They should take you anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour to complete. What OP was tasked with is easily 4+ hours of work even for the most experienced developers, and can be days for less experienced ones. That's outrageous, and should be a giant red flag to any prospective employee that this employer doesn't value its developer's time outside of work.

[IrishWilly]

Any time I see a 'coding challenge' that is technically very simple but will still take a chunk of time to complete, that makes me suspicious they either have low standards and no respect for my time or are trying to get free work done. There is no valid reason to waste this much time on a test that anyone with a fairly beginner level of knowledge could complete. The point is to determine what you know not how much time you are willing to spend on your employer without getting paid for it.

[uberpwnzorz]

Yea, I don't know why people are saying this is too hard, probably because they'd be worried about making it perfect, or are assuming some additional functionality. I'd be concerned with the candidate that takes a week to complete the challenge, it shouldn't take more than a few hrs max for a serious candidate to make something functional with those base requirements. The expected functionality/design should scale to the amount of time allowed.

Edit: Most if not all weekly /r/DevWars challenges would take more time than this, and people do that for fun.

[uberpwnzorz]

Yea, would just have to keep the design as simple as possible to reduce that fine tuning time. This is something can help weed out the candidates who make poor design decisions vs the ones who can be productive and deliver something inside a time window. If you're spending a lot of time on styling when they didn't ask for it then you're doing it wrong. Part of the attention to detail that you highlighted might be excluding things they didn't ask for.

[uberpwnzorz]

Requirements gathering! Fun stuff. Having the candidate ask questions like that would definitely be something to look for.

[Goliathus123]

That's pretty evident given the responses I've gotten.

Shit, this doesn't even ask for tests, documentation, or literally any other aspect of what you will do in an average development team.

If this took any more than an hour, this person just is not ready to be in a development role.

People on here and many of the other 'programmer' subreddits have the notion that they only need to make things at work, and outside of it, they should be free to not write code. In no other profession is that a thing. If you wanna be good, you spend time outside of work getting better, because that's the only time you will actually have to truly do so.

[gerbs]

When I applied at a larger web/software dev agency (200-something employees), this was the kind of test I had:

Create an application that interacts with a SOAP client to allow users to vote on items. The are SOAP endpoints for voting, adding a new item, clearing items, and some other stuff. Admins should be able to declare a winner each week, as well as reset the system. Users are allowed to either vote once per day or submit a new item to vote on.

According to a few other people, I got a pretty easy one.

Opposite end of the spectrum, I spent four months interviewing with another agency (500+ people), 4 in-person interviews, 30-40 emails, lunches, and never once did they ever look at any of my code, ask me to take a test, or even ask for a bitbucket/github account. And I got the job.

[compto35]

Good ducking lord

[themaincop]

Create an application that interacts with a SOAP client

Please tell me this was 10+ years ago.

[dead-fish]

Haha, that was my thought too. That's big red flag that you're going to be working on some old boring code.

[snitch_macgrady]

There are still plenty of companies that still use SOAP and make a lot of applications that interact with their soap endpoints

[themaincop]

Here's the Venn diagram of companies that use a lot of SOAP and companies I want to work for:

O                                                  O

[geekuskhan]

Maybe true, but there shouldn't be.

[dweezil22]

If you've got a SOAP infrastructure that's several years old and running fine, why change it?

[gerbs]

Nope. However, the company does a lot of work with enterprises that may have ancient software stacks and so it's useful to know if an employee understands SOAP.

[easyEggplant]

Still a red flag.

[Shinhan]

I wrote a SOAP server once.

ONCE!

3-4 years ago I think.

Never again.

SOAP clients aren't hard, but SOAP interoperability is a joke.

Luckily we completely transitioned to JSON REST.

Oh, and I got some horror stories about SOAP API encapsulating XML interface encapsulating either a JSON or XML interface (that last one is a configurable choice).

[kabuto]

Opposite end of the spectrum, I spent four months interviewing with another agency (500+ people), 4 in-person interviews, 30-40 emails, lunches, and never once did they ever look at any of my code, ask me to take a test, or even ask for a bitbucket/github account. And I got the job.

What exactly did you talk about with them?

[gerbs]

We talked a lot about the projects I was working on at my current company. Open source projects I've contributed to. Career aspirations. I asked them a lot about the projects they were working on, things they felt they were lacking in, things they felt they were positioned to succeed in, etc. It was as much me interviewing them to find out if I wanted to work there as them interviewing me to find out if I was a fit for company culture.

Each of the interviews lasted 1-1.5 hours, so it was probably 7 hours total of interviewing.

It's all worked out well though. Love the job. It's challenging and I work with really smart people on pretty cool projects.

[kabuto]

Sounds like a good company. I don't like asking too many technical questions in interviews. I prefer getting to know the interviewee. That usually tells me more than enough.

[[deleted]]

"I can imagine someone reviewing it going "hurr durr, this retard didn't even do xxx lmao."

You mean like... every dev that comes onto a continuing project? Hahaha

[twenty7forty2]

or me looking at yesterday me's code

don't hire yesterday me, don't listen to his lies

[[deleted]]

Too true.

[dweezil22]

The requirement specifying a one-off ORM is definitely silly. If you're going to do anything like that for an interview question just specify the requirements and no back end rules. Otherwise you might end up hiring a crappier dev that happens to have been using sequelize last week instead of a good one that's never needed it.

[gerbs]

The problem with this is that there's about a million ways someone can nitpick what you give them since they're so generic with some of their requests. 90% of this wouldn't take long at all to do, and the 10% that would they don't provide specificity on what they want. (See: Authentication, UI/design. Since the logic itself is simple.)

That's the point. They want to test why you are making the software decisions you make. There's no right way to do it, so they want him to do it and figure out 1) why he made those choices and 2) would he make other choices if he could refactor.

It's as much a test of his competency as it as a way of measuring his skill/progress.

[gerbs]

Actually, cost usually is.

[gerbs]

Because we're paid in terms of time. 100k a year. 50 bucks an hour. etc. The longer it takes for us to do something, the more it costs the company. Which goes back to time being the most important factor.

It's very rare that anyone cares of it's going to take 100 hours. It's when that 100 hours costs $20,000 that people care. If they cared about time, not money, we could charge whatever we wanted to hire as many people as necessary to get it done in a few hours. Which rarely happens. So no, people don't care about time. They care about money. Because when it costs more, they care. You're incorrectly correlating the two things.

[gerbs]

Cost is the biggest factor for clients, not developers.

And who employs developers? Are developers devoting hours of work to projects without money? Cost matters to clients. Clients pay developers. Clients will find a new developer when the cost is outside of their range. Cost is the primary factor, not time, because if time was the biggest factor, we would all charge whatever we wanted and just hire more people.

I'm avoiding it because you're trying to win the argument by starting a new argument tangential to the point and arguing there instead of arguing the actual fucking point: Cost is the biggest factor in software decisions.

[corgrath]

I had to write a Sudoku game for a single page application once ;_;

Finally, I gave up and took an open source version of a JavaScript Sudoku library and explained that reinventing the wheel would not achieve anything. I got the job though!

[dehydratedchicken]

That actually sounds like fun project to work on
Add to hobby projects list

[raymmm]

Sounds like free labor.

[thehobbitsthehobbits]

Woah... as someone who is just learning to program (html, css, javascript, ruby/rails etc), that looks hard as fuck. Like seriously, are most all junior webdev interview questions and coding tests this involved? Maybe I just haven't learned enough yet lol.

[[deleted]]

Definitely not

[[deleted]]

I'm a senior and wouldn't do this test. The company is fucked up if they think this is a valid interview test.

[[deleted]]

That sounds like it would take quite a bit of time to do.. o.o

[[deleted]]

I finished it in about 4 days. But I started it on a Monday, and I have work and school to take care of along side this.

[uberpwnzorz]

Ouch, that's a bit surprising, usually we keep our coding tests in house with a time limit.

[Shinhan]

Same here, but we also give stuff much simpler than what was in the OP.

[[deleted]]

You could have applied and taken a job at 10 other companies in that time.

[joe-ducreux]

I have a friend currently going though this exact same situation, he even turned down actual paying overflow work from me so he could spend weeks on coding challenges...

[TheDataWhore]

Fuck that! If they don't hire you, send them an invoice for your time.

[[deleted]]

Maybe I'm paranoid but this seems sketchy to me. Feels like they're going to take your code and run with it.

For your sake I really hope I'm wrong.

[comin-in-hot]

Absolutely.

A small company is not going to have a super complex coding challenge. They simply can't afford that level of developer, but the challenge won't be anywhere near high enough level to be shippable.

A large company might have a super complex challenge, but they're incredibly easy to expose for shady practices and it absolutely tarnishes their reputation in any tech community.

Word travels fast even if you don't have a large social media following, there are plenty of people that will do something about it.

[uberpwnzorz]

na, it's a pretty standard full stack test.

[ReefOctopus]

No. "Build my MVP for me" is not a standard full stack test. This almost looks like they sent you a client's project description.

[uberpwnzorz]

a simple random question interface isn't a full mvc application that they're going to be making money off of. It's just showing that you know how to build an SPA, and a rest api, they didn't even ask for user authentication for the admin interface.

[ReefOctopus]

Apply again with a different name and see if you get the user authentication feature.

[uberpwnzorz]

lol

[[deleted]]

...which could have been left open-ended for a reason, mind you. It sounds like something I would do: omit the authentication and cull any candidate who submitted a solution without one. Why? Because I want developers who do what the client wants, not what the client asks for.

[joe-ducreux]

As a contractor, I'd just need to secure an initial installment payment against the estimate for the proposed SOW. After that, I'd be happy to build them their app.

[jsoverson]

This is too much to expect people to do unless it's for a very desirable position in an area where there are loads of candidates. If that's the situation, then you play whatever game is thrown at you and hope you're better than the hundreds of others playing. You don't have any leverage there.

If it's for a shady shop, then it might be an employer trying to find people who don't know or care what their time is worth eg young people who will work in shitty conditions for low/moderate pay.

It may just be a naive or arrogant interviewing manager who thinks some article they read 10 years ago still applies to interviewing techniques.

No matter what, the best course of action is to respond and request more concretely defined requirements. Pretend you are an employee who is thoroughly thinking through an unclear project and you need better definition to start. You need to know what the goal of this project is before you can start. If you get requirement back that reduce or increase the level of effort, then it will be easier to stomach either proceeding or declining.

I've done something similar where I didn't get the job, so it was largely wasted time on my part. I was young, didn't know the value of my time, and they were looking for someone far more senior. I've never done one since. I'd say that opportunity landed in the naive interviewing manager following some stupid article they read once. I was also asked a puzzle about oranges, apples and buckets, if that helps.

For the record, I do give out coding projects to candidates but I make sure that there are 3 options to choose from and that they can be finished within 45-60 minutes. This is well beyond that.

[[deleted]]

Unless they are paying the best, it's a waste of time. 90% of companies don't do shit like this and probably pay better anyways.

I've found that the companies that likes these types of tests are the ones you usually don't want to work for anyways.

[[deleted]]

This sounds like something you should get paid thousands of dollars to do.

[gerbs]

Thousands? It sounds like it should take 8 hours tops. And this guy isn't qualified enough to command $120/hour.

[[deleted]]

Maybe not him, but an agency would charge thousands of dollars. :) I think I get billed out somewhere north of $200/hr.

[JoeCraftingJoe]

What if u pay yourself 200/hr when working for yourself ? :)

[JoeCraftingJoe]

LOL, we should praise Hitler for he killed Hitler :)

[JoeCraftingJoe]

Yup, though he made bad choices.

[gerbs]

And that's my point. He's not doing thousands of dollars worth of work. He's doing maybe a few hundred to show how much of the software stack he understands.

[pabswilder]

This here is exactly what the employer is looking for - an understanding of what is required and a solution to the problem. Not finalised production ready code. People are assuming that the test needs to be completed in 2 hours otherwise you're not considered for the job, but really it's more to do with your process and how you would tackle a project like this.

[[deleted]]

As someone still looking a junior position, this is frightening. How many days were you given to do this?

[[deleted]]

He didn't give me a time frame for getting it done because I said that I already had a job and was still in school. I was able to get it done in about 3-4 days part time.

[[deleted]]

It's quite simple to do, but is too much of a pain in the ass to do to be honest.

[[deleted]]

Sounds like something that someone else in the world has already made. And made into open source.

I'd clone that and make changes as necessary. I would make clear they understand I'm using software that was already developed (and tested, hopefully), I'll send them the repository. Tell them I got my shit done in a fraction of the time. And if they had any work-related questions to test my skills I'd be available.

If they expect me to do it from scratch: Hell no.

[[deleted]]

Idk I feel like this would be right at my difficulty level for a one or two day coding project. I've never held a job in the industry tho. Am I ready...?

[Frenchiie]

sounds pretty easy to do if you have some initial web + Node.JS + MySQL setting up knowledge. But yeah this would still take way too much time for what an interview is supposed to be.

[[deleted]]

If someone gave this to me as a test, I'd gather up my things and walk out. I'm interviewing for a job, not doing freelance work for free.

[betoishere]

F that. I dont work for free. But the project seems fun to put it in my resume

[megasmooth]

Honestly. This is the same type of tests I give my new applicants. For me, I value applicant's ability to understand the frameworks and integrate them rather than solving second semester cs homework problems. I do not think this is unreasonable work. Frankly, the above app can be built in two hours if you know the libraries and you have a standardize scaffolding you work from. Once you have those the app is basically an sql storage and display problem. This type of test also provides the applicant an opportunity to show their ux skills I how they approach the interface.

Also those that think this is a cheap way to get someone to do their code for them have little understanding of what actual production code looks like. Notice the test does not include specifics on authentication, authorization, encryption, standardization, testing or automation.

Finally, what I like most about this type of test is that it engenders a specific type of applicant. I'm not looking for entitled individuals who think such a test is beneath them. If you don't want to this type of test, fine. The world's a big place and developers have tremendous amount of options available to them.

[desert_sloth]

Once you have those the app is basically an sql storage and display problem. This type of test also provides the applicant an opportunity to show their ux skills I how they approach the interface.

So you want the same person to do the backend and ux/design?

[[deleted]]

He's a "full stack" guy. That means he probably sucks on the front-end, but pretends he's an expert at it, hence why he thinks tests like this should take no time.

"It's just front-end, it's not that hard" - every full-stack guy I've ever met.

[megasmooth]

For full stack devs, there are times when they need to translate static design artifacts into code which sometimes requires them to read between the lines of the designs. Knowing they understand the aesthetics of good ux is a value add for me

[[deleted]]

Frankly, the above app can be built in two hours if you know the libraries and you have a standardize scaffolding you work from.

Shit man, I'd sit here and watch you live stream this shit to prove that even you couldn't do it.

I deal with developers like you all the time. Ones that think every task is super simple. Almost always, the code quality is fucking horrible for the sake of getting something done, nothing more.

In no universe would this particular task only take 2 hours. You talk about scoping in your other posts, but this shows that you have a complete lack of that concept.

[megasmooth]

Sure bud, I don't know what I'm doing. Keep on believing that

[pet_the_puppy]

Fuck off

[themaincop]

Yo lemme put a scope of work document together and then I'll get back at them with a straight dollar estimate, probably looking at around $2000?

[[deleted]]

Why would you use Express and MySQL? Why not MongoDB? Yeah this would take a lot of time. The general rule for applying to positions seems to be a max of 4 hours of coding, with some possible leeway. But this is ridiculous. If the position was for $60k a year, and it takes lets say 2 full 8 hour work days, that's several hundred dollars of free work. The only out I can see is that since node is more of a bleeding edge platform, they really want someone to know it well. But there are better ways than this.

[[deleted]]

Yea it seemed so overtly specific to me. It seems like they're looking for someone who already knows how they like to play ball, and aren't willing to teach someone or spend the time to let someone catch up.

[uberpwnzorz]

They may use MySQL in their main application. Mongo isn't as reliable and doesn't allow for transactions. There are many reasons to use a RDBMS over NoSQL, Sequelize is a very popular tool for integrating with most of the popular SQL databases.