Quick Rant About Coding Challenges

I recently received this feedback from a recruitment firm:

Coding challenges are the best way for the employers to check candidate’s skills and knowledge — that’s why it is quite usual to use them during the recruitment process.

I highly dispute this.

Coding challenges do not represent everyday development and production-ready development mindset, often the problem is only thought about as far as the specification requests, and isn’t reasoned about in a wider context.

Very frequently coding challenges are graded based on arbitrary measurements & random samplings of code. They don’t often result in a consistent view of how a developer works, what they know, or what you really want to know which is how that person learns and understands information.

Even more frequently, they misrepresent the actual job the developer will perform, and request large amounts of essentially unpaid developer time. This means that people without this excessive amount of additional time will likely churn from your recruitment pipeline.

You would be far better off asking all candidates a set of standardised questions, and if they answer “I don’t know” then ask them how they would resolve that gap in their knowledge.

Sure, you want to know what a developer can do, but coding is just a small percentage of a developers job, much larger parts are communication and learning, paired with reasoning and logic.