Re:Ask HN: What is your language choice for coding challenges?
by technion on Thursday August 25, 2016 @01:52AM
(#12357170)
I think this is actually a flaw in many such challenges.
I hit questions where I would say "I would do that in production in Erlang, or C", but then the only metric you are judged on is time, and suddenly I'm writing Ruby again.
I think that's fine when the challenge is scoped as "who can solve this challenge?", but there are "job application" type challenges with tight timers where this is just the wrong approach. It's similar to why you never write tests in such environments, once you get a tick on the challenge.
I hit questions where I would say "I would do that in production in Erlang, or C", but then the only metric you are judged on is time, and suddenly I'm writing Ruby again.
I think that's fine when the challenge is scoped as "who can solve this challenge?", but there are "job application" type challenges with tight timers where this is just the wrong approach. It's similar to why you never write tests in such environments, once you get a tick on the challenge.