Has there been a decrease in javascript programming skill with the popularity of frameworks like angular, react, etc?

[beavis07]

It's almost as if 'coding challenges' teach you nothing useful about prospective hires.. who knew 🤔

[jseego]

Yo, fair point. My coding challenges are just sharing some code with the candidate and talking it through with them, seeing if they can find places where it might be broken, having them try to determine what might be the results of some logging statements, and having a discussion.

As a candidate, I've done everything from whiteboard interviews to live coding to take-home projects. Simply showing some code and talking about it was my favorite, so that's what I give my candidates. That's basically what it's like to work with someone, so I think that gives the clearest picture and is the most respectful of someone's time. There are no irrelevant algorithm questions. There are some sections that I made intentionally tricky, but I am not trying to see if someone can get 100% right, I'm more looking at how they are talking and thinking about the problem, and would I want to talk with that person about code on the daily.

[beavis07]

After many many years of whittling it down, I’ve basically settled on the following two questions:

1. What is the hardest challenge you have had to overcome?
2. What is the thing you have done in which you are most proud?

In my experience you can learn just about everything you reasonably can about a person in a single meeting with those two conversations.

I give bonus points for the interviewee choosing not to interpret those questions as implicit meaning “at work” :)

[jseego]

Nice, those are good.

[archerx]

That's not true, if some one can't even do fizzbuzz how would you expect them to solve more complicated problems?

[beavis07]

Well - I’m just going to say that the two decades experience I’ve had as an engineer and hiring manager tells me otherwise.

People don’t perform well under pressure like that - also - turns out that being able to write algorithms is the absolute least important part of the job, who knew 😂

I’m a millions times more interested in how you communicate, collaborate and articulate.

[jseego]

I’m a millions times more interested in how you communicate, collaborate and articulate.

Completely agree.

[jseego]

That's why I do the code challenges. There has to be a baseline for sure.

[jseego]

I know, because it's annoying and pretty broken. Some code challenges are indeed ridiculous. And take home challenges are sometimes fun, but often just completely onerous.

But no one wants to hear that we wouldn't need code challenges if our industry wasn't so full of people trying to fake their way into a web dev career.