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This just smacks of defensive justification for lack of participation. "I don't do this and I don't want to do this, so I'm going to bash it and the people who do it so I can pretend I'm making a choice instead of just being lazy". It's a little bit like the folks who say, "I'm saving myself for marriage" when in reality they've never been on a date in their lives.

Pretending like people can't think in more than one mindset is an inaccurate model. I've never done an honest-to-goodness coding competition, but I can imagine someone who does code competitively to think very differently when they're competing vs. when they're designing/implementing a solution as a professional endeavor.

Someone would have to explain to me in much more detail how this "negative correlation" is established before I believe it.



I have refused to do a couple of time pressure hacker rank challenges as part of a job interviews recently, as it is not how I work on a day to day basis. I was good at these sort of things fresh out of university 15 years ago. I have never had to implement any algorithm under time pressure in my professional career.


Why must it be "how you work on a day to day basis"?

Why must interviews only be about exactly what you're being hired to do?


I would like to think it is at least somewhat related to what I am doing, rather than a lucky dip of a question that I might get or might not. I am a way better software engineer than 15 years ago, yet I am worse at these sort of "challenges".


There's a lot more to being a software engineer than coding competence, and timed questions reveal the non-coding competence parts of your abilities more than anything else.

Perhaps you're not as good as you think.


Like what?


Seriously?

Less than half of a software engineer's daily work is actually coding.


I mean what other components of your competence do the timed coding exercises reveal?


Prototyping, for one. Thought process. Creative thinking. Knowledge of relevant material.

It may not do these better than other tests, but basically any "solve this in x minutes" questions are going to reveal behavior in a person.


Why does crate thinking have to done fast? I find my best and most creative solutions come randomly after thinking about them "in the background" for a while.


It doesn't, you must not have read what I wrote.

But if I can do the same creative thinking faster than you can, why would anyone bother waiting for you?


> Someone would have to explain to me in much more detail how this "negative correlation" is established

I think it's just a statistical correlation they found in the hiring data.


I'd need to know more about the hiring data, the actual correlation method, how they collected the data, what was the sample size...

Basically, like I wrote, I would need to know more.




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