In truth, it's really hard to judge if someone is a self-starter, creative or able to follow basic directions just based on a resume. Giving them a basic coding take-home (and I mean basic, 30-60 minutes should be more than enough) is a good way to see if: they just grabbed stackoverflow answers, chatgpt solutions, actually wrote any documentation or tests.
I agree as a candidate it can be demoralizing, but thats the exchange usually - prove you can do the job (or something close to it) and you get hired for it. It's just that your job isn't street sweeping or generalized labor -- and it's helpful to know if you're going to be the type who: Couldn't write leftpad without a library, would depend on leftpad as a library, or would understand the implications of using a library like leftpad and rely solely on trusted functions like isEven instead.
Yes, you're a programmer, you will get libraries in your day job - but as your hiring manager, I don't have the time to tell you you won't have access to most of the ones you're familiar with because we're doing real-time or large-scale compute or javascript widgets on embedded devices - I just wanna see you do as asked.
I'm not sure you'd be able to distinguish ChatGPT's output once somebody who actually knows how to properly do software engineering and how to structure a codebase and write code would go through it.
ChatGPT is a really good junior programmer who can write basic functions per best practices, and when it makes a mistake or does something weird, a senior SWE will spot it, and can fix it with much less mental effort than writing the function.
Yeah for that you're better off using one of the live-coding platforms rather than take home, but my point stands -- mostly this is just the trash-can test. "What would you do if I asked you to get me that trash can?" - if your response is to go off on job roles and responsibilities, call janitorial whatever, those are fine responses -- but the winner? They just go get you a trash can.
Job's are not a popularity contest - it's about if you'll do what's asked of you, or if you'll spend more time arguing about the right way to code something rather than solving the business need -- and for my purposes, I need the business problems solved, not someone who gets self-righteous when asked to show an example of them working when applying for, ya know, work.
I have zero interest in arguing with a candidate who, when asked to implement bubble sort argues the requirements instead of the implementation. I have NDA's that may preclude me from telling you the details of the stack you'll be working on. The job listing should reasonably describe the environment (embedded, data warehousing, frontend, whatever). You're being asked to implement something super basic to prove you can code yourself out of a wet paper bag basically.
Many cannot, and those that argue the premise don't even get a chance to try.
If you think you're being evaluated on your knowledge of the stdlib's sort(), you misunderstand the purpose. You're being tested not because you can hit compile and it passes, but you're being tested on if you're able to follow directions, work within scope, solve problems and explain your thinking. If your thinking stops at "I'd never do that", so does mine.
> would understand the implications of using a library like leftpad and rely solely on trusted functions like isEven instead.
Tangent — how is isEven trusted? It seems people usually categorize leftpad and isEven pretty similarly (e.g. pointless bloat deps waiting to be next supply-chain attack), so I don’t follow the distinction you’re making.
I was absolutely snarking on NPM's collection of libraries - so that pointing to 'libraries exist' isn't necessarily a good point; Stupid libraries exist, expertise is knowing which ones to pick. Both of them would get you laughed out of a code-review in my org.
I agree as a candidate it can be demoralizing, but thats the exchange usually - prove you can do the job (or something close to it) and you get hired for it. It's just that your job isn't street sweeping or generalized labor -- and it's helpful to know if you're going to be the type who: Couldn't write leftpad without a library, would depend on leftpad as a library, or would understand the implications of using a library like leftpad and rely solely on trusted functions like isEven instead.
Yes, you're a programmer, you will get libraries in your day job - but as your hiring manager, I don't have the time to tell you you won't have access to most of the ones you're familiar with because we're doing real-time or large-scale compute or javascript widgets on embedded devices - I just wanna see you do as asked.
If you decline - I've seen what I needed.