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And yet you are misrepresenting what I have claimed about coding tests. I have never once claimed it as useful for determining who would be GOOD at a job. I have claimed they are useful for filtering out applicants who are completely unable to do a job. This is an incredibly useful thing to do when swamped with dozens of similar applications for, say, a junior developer role. But again, this is just a first step. By no means should this test determine who gets hired, it merely helps narrow down the interview pool to something more manageable.

Is there a risk of falsely filtering good applicants? Yes. But that is the exception, not the rule.

Sigh. Why do I keep letting myself get sucked back into this? You see it as an illegitimate tool. I see it as legitimate. We disagree. I'm not going to agree with you, and you're not going to agree with me. So I'm done here. If you'd like to keep arguing by yourself, you go right ahead.

That's not 'the problem'. That's the disagreement. You claim it's not a legitimate tool. I say that it is. We obviously disagree and this is going absolutely nowhere.

Yup, I still genuinely disagree with most of your points. Just not seeing the connection between using an interviewing tool and being a dysfunctional company. But like I said, spinning tires, etc. All the best to you going forward!

Was the sarcasm a bit much? Yeah, probably. But really, everyone makes hard decisions when it comes to jobs. I just find it somewhat amusing that someone would reject a company entirely because they disagree with one single facet of a multi-step interview process.

While we're at it, I don't particularly appreciate many of the insinuations people have made about my team and my employers based simply on the fact that I see a role for automated coding tests in the interview process. But like you said, I don't take it personally either.

Coding tests are just one tool in an interviewing toolbox. Like any tool, they can be - and are - abused. You feel that any use of that tool is indicative of some unredeemable flaw in the company as a whole. I feel that the tool has a genuine role in the initial candidate screening process. We obviously disagree, and are spinning our tires trying to convince each other, so there's really no point in continuing the discussion.

Ha ha! Wow, that does sound difficult. You're a real trooper.

Are you thinking of white board problems? Because that is not at all what I'm talking about here.

Don't be so quick to speak for all developers. Most good developers I've encountered are willing to put some effort in to find the right job.

Gonna have to disagree on that one. If some fraction of that bottom 60% gets through, that's perfectly fine - this is only the first step after all, and there are real interviews still to come.

And if this mystical top 5% can't spare the ten minutes to run through what is essentially an interviewing captcha - for a job they were obviously interested in enough to apply for in the first place - then how do I know they won't consider themselves too good to do their actual work if I do end up hiring then? I'm happy to hire the next 5% down the list of it means they have a good attitude and a willingness to do their job.

And what's the alternative? I waste my team's time setting up screening phone interviews for every halfway decent resume that comes down the pipe? With the number of applications that we get, we'd be losing days of time every time we look to hire, before we even got to the actual interviewing.

Who said anything about grading results or comparing applicants? This should be a screening test, nothing more. Pass/fail. Any decent developer should be able to knock out decent responses to simple problems in very little time with no prep. The goal is simply to eliminate the ones who can't even do that.

I'm screening them to eliminate the garbage? I'm not sure I understand your point here. We don't choose the applicants we want to apply, the applicants choose which companies to apply for.

The problems with companies that you mention above have nothing to do with the coding test, it's the company itself. Those are perfectly valid reasons not to continue the application process. But eliminating a company because they apply a coding test as a basic level of applicant screening still strikes me as an arbitrary move that does nothing but rule out perfectly valid job opportunities.

But look at it from the company's point of view - why would they invest time in a 30-minute skill check interview for every applicant if they can just as easily run the code challenge up front and eliminate a large proportion of the unsuitable applicants?

If the company looks like garbage though, why are you applying?

Ugh.

Using a coding test shouldn't be a red flag. They are an incredibly useful tool for weeding out the applicants who, quite frankly, don't know their ass from their keyboard.

I've done hiring at several companies over the years, and I can honestly say that the signal-to-noise ratio for programmers tends to be very low. Even eliminating the obviously unqualified resumes leaves us with dozens of supposedly 'qualified' developers. Further followup however in most cases (probably 60 to 80% of the time, depending on the seniority of the position) reveals that the applicant is all talk, and can't solve even the simplest of problems.

Eliminating that 60-80% of applicants is an issue. We could have, say, a brief phone interview with each applicant, trying to figure out which ones are garbage and which are good. But that would tie up actual employees for hours and hours, doing something that most of them would much rather not be doing. Instead, using a coding test to weed out the morons can work wonders. We set them all up with a simple problem set, and a day later it becomes very obvious which of the applicants are worth bringing in for a real interview.

Now don't get me wrong - if an employer rejects you because of a spelling mistake or judges you because they say you solved a problem 'wrong', then yeah, that employer likely sucks and you should be happy to have been passed over. But rejecting an employer simply because they asked you to do a test? The only one you're hurting is yourself.