> If I pass a coding test, stay at a company for a year, then apply to other companies, I'm going to subjected to coding tests even though I just passed one only a year ago.

Well it’s not like the company you’re applying to has access to the test results from the company you’re leaving

> It's like companies are afraid that programmers will spontaneously forget how to program.

To be fair, I think most leetcoders agree that you need to practice regularly to keep your skills up. So if the point is to see how good you are at thinking algorithmically for the job you’re applying for, it makes sense that they’d want to see recent test results.

Well, the test result is pass/fail, and if you can verify I worked at a previous company, then you know I passed. The legwork might be finding out what their interview is like.

Every skill degrades without usage, but if you can verify that I've recently used it successfully, I'm not sure why I'm being tested on it again.

> Well it’s not like the company you’re applying to has access to the test results from the company you’re leaving

Which is a better signal? Passing a leetcode style interview, or 5+ years in a development role at a reputable company?

Are you proposing waiving technical interviews for people who worked in "reputable" companies?

> Are you proposing waiving technical interviews for people who worked in "reputable" companies?

Yes, of course. If you have a degree from a recognized schools and many years of experience at the job, why would you be hazed on undergrad trivia you've forgotten decades ago?

None of my high school friends who went into accounting, finance, medicine, law, etc have this problem. What is it with the dysfunctional hiring BS in software development?

A surgeon with many experience at a top hospital most certainly does not get grilled on organic chemistry trivia from their undergrad classes when chaning jobs.

There seems to be a class of engineer here on HN that is offended by being asked to demonstrate their competence.

I mean, if I ask each of the engineers at a company I'm about to join to do a live coding test, they'll just tell me to go away.

The reason I would ask this because I don't want to join a team that writes bad code.

They would tell me that each engineer did the same test and passed.

I would then say, "I don't believe you, I demand a live exercise so you can't cheat and help each other out". After all, their skills could have deteriorated since they joined!

People are only offended because companies don't believe our past demonstrations of competence.

You get to see their standards when you interview with them. You are free to decline their offer if you feel that the bar was too low, and maybe their engineers write bad code. On the other hand, they do not know the standards of the company you came from.

In 20+ years, I have rarely seen a technical interview actually be indicative of a team’s standards. I’ve seen good, bad, and much in between, but mostly I’ve found the “standards” communicated during the interview to be purely aspirational at best.

Both. Barack Obama calls this a "false choice". There isn't a single best signal. Both have positives. Ideally, you want a candidate with both.

A never ending high pressure gauntlet, of course! The dream of dreams!

> We need a credential that counts as passing a technical interview

So we could call that a degree? And have institutions that specialise in testing for it? And because some of those institutions will be better at measuring this, we could rank them?

I thought most people complaining about the current approach didn't like this one either.

An Engineering degree from even a prestigious University doesnt make you an Engineer in many disciplines. You have to go do a different credential to start putting together buildings and bridges.

Having a Medical Degree (Doctorate in Medicine), doesnt mean you are credentialed to be a practicing doctor either. Doctors btw dont get asked to "go diagnose this patient real quick" during their interviews.

Credentialism in tech is an interesting rabbit hole. We basically do have nurses vs doctors with degrees of speciality, but some places pay them all the same. Some places do pay the backend engineer differently from the front end guys.

Its well known that bare metal C engineers are not making as much as React devs in alot of cities, and most people seem to broadly agree the C engineer has a harder task than the React one.

So we would need to figure out whats the CNA/LPN/NP, doctor, general doctor, brain surgeon, and veterinarian of our fields. But it's not quite so simple right? We might think front end where you are grinding out simple React or PHP apps is easy, but if you are a front end dev on a billion plus dollar selling system or with very high stakes stuff going on you probably do want a "doctor level" dev right? You probably dont need the AI dev though (the brain surgeon) if we continue the analogy.

>Doctors btw dont get asked to "go diagnose this patient real quick" during their interviews.

They might not be asked to do this because their board has already done it for them: https://www.abim.org/Media/h5whkrfe/internal-medicine.pdf

> An Engineering degree from even a prestigious University doesnt make you an Engineer in many disciplines.

A US-centric view. My (Swiss) engineering degree certifies me as a software engineer ("ing. info. dipl. EPF", whose use is legally restricted to actual graduates).

who exactly is going to refuse to hire you as a software engineer if you dont have that degree again?

I think the suggestion is for something more like the Bar Exam.

At least in California, you don't have to go to law school to take this exam, and if you pass it you are just as qualified to practice law as someone who did go to law school. I doubt that happens very often but at least it's possible.

OTOH a Software Bar Exam would probably be much worse than the leetcode grind because it would inevitably become something you can only realistically pass right after finishing a very good CS degree, or equivalent study, in your 30's at the very latest. And it would become a de facto requirement for the better jobs, making the privilege bias even worse.

https://www.calbar.ca.gov/Admissions/Examinations/California...

I think that most people here are mistaking the finger for the moon. If discrimination is really the reason why we have this kind of interviews, the problem to solve is discrimination and not the hiring process that is attempting to fix it or to hide it.

A qualitative hiring interview would be perfectly fine if the interviewers had no discrimination in their minds. The real solution is having minds without it. It's probably a goal hard to achieve with grown up people. Easier with newborns. So any solution starts from their parents, grandparents, etc and will stretch over many generations. Education, mingle with people from every origin and background, etc, pick your favorites.

How many generations? Limiting ourselves to the USA think how long it took for women to get a vote since the Constitution and for an Obama to become president since the end of slavery. We can hope that the trend is accelerating but who knows what's going to happen next. The state of the rest of the Western world is not so different.

This is the optimum. Now the good because there will be interviews to do this year. Any stop gap solution would do but don't invest too much into it because if you don't remove the real problem any fix will be worked around.

> I think that most people here are mistaking the finger for the moon. If discrimination is really the reason why we have this kind of interviews, the problem to solve is discrimination and not the hiring process that is attempting to fix it or to hide it.

Agree in that if discrimination is the problem, then thats the problem that needs fixed. But, if these companies really wanted to solve the problem of discrimination then they would be making efforts to do so besides leetcode.

I saw it mentioned earlier in this thread, people can subconsciously discriminate without necessarily realizing it from something as simple as seeing someone's name, their voice, appearance, etc. It's not that the hiring manager is consciously racist but they may have a picture in their head of what a "software engineer" looks or acts like, and if the candidate doesn't fit that mental model they are dismissed regardless of their skill.

In that case, why not anonymize the candidates as much as possible? Don't let the interviewee and interviewer see each other during the technical interview, don't even let those making hiring decisions see their name, distort the voice, etc. Make it as close as possible to "anonymous person A being asked technical questions from anonymous person B." Make the hiring decision and only then de-anonymize the candidate.

I recently had an interview for an ops role (sysadmin type) and was asked a series of PowerShell questions, normally no problem - but the interviewer wouldn't accept "I don't remember the exact cmdlet, but I could do Get-Command Get-xyz* to find it" as if they expected an encyclopedic knowledge of every powershell cmdlet ever made. On the actual job built-in help exists, google exists, KBs exist, etc. Why would I ever be expected to have all this information in memory when the resources to find the information I need is a keystroke away. Test for understanding theory and methodology, not specific commands/language function.

Anonymity gets us not very far.

People still have to see people to work together unless we spend all our time in Matrix like cocoons. When they see each other and don't like what they see somebody gets fired or mobbed.

We can't expect companies to solve social problems. It's not what they are built for. They can hack around problems, create plausible deniability or anything else and that's all.

People solve social problems. I wasn't alive when they happened in the 50 / 60s but I saw recordings of people doing Civil Rights marches etc, not companies.

No. One of the reasons those leetcode interviews happen is because existing credentials, such as a bachelor's degree, don't work. Adding another one that some hirers will value highly and others will be skeptical of doesn't solve anything.

What we really need is for companies to stop trying so hard to find the absolute best most perfectest candidate that they screen out huge numbers who could have done the job but who missed some arbitrary keyword or coding test by a fraction.

IMO, I think we just need a way of easily firing people if they suck. It's very very difficult to termi ate without fear of retribution so the barriers to entry just keep getting taller.

If we could take a gamble on people and see if they sink or swim we could give a lot more opportunities.

It's not hard. At virtually every small company I worked for, not only is there no leetcode bullshit, firing wankers is as easy as giving them the termination slip. US has at will employment, 'you've been fired' is literally all you need to say, no explanation is required. You get hired after a conversation with a CEO, in my experience the hiring and firing process are both completed in under an hour.

I work at big companies. It's basically impossible. You have to transfer them to Milton's basement office and pray their inflated self-evaluations make them look for a new job.

>I think we just need a way of easily firing people if they suck.

It is very easy to fire someone, especially in the first 90 days. Most states are "at will," meaning you can fire anyone at any time for any reason (outside protected classes) and the employee can leave at any time.

Legally, it's easy. But getting the HR bureaucracy to go along with it is a long and unpleasant process. The last time I fired someone for doing no work at all and arguing over everything, it took about 8 months.

Unfortunately, my company is not unusual in this respect.

There are a lot of companies without HR. Due to my background I haven't been hired for for a company with an HR (other than contract work) for probably a decade. If you want to hire and fire people easily, look for small companies, usually less than 20 people. Beyond that the CEOs tend to get tired of dealing with human administrative tasks, so it gets offloaded to HR. CEOs have a lot more risk tolerance so naturally when HR gets involved they focus on saving their own asses (which usually means taking low-risk rather than highest profit) rather than the good of the company.

If Leetcode becomes a credential onto its own, then at least job seekers aren’t asked to retake it at every company they interview for.

> We need a credential that counts as passing a technical interview

This idea already exists in many forms. Pick any language, platform, or technical concept and there's someone offering training and certification.

It also describes the whole recruiting industry. "What if there was one person who did a lot of interviews and then presented just the best people to employers?"

It's an extremely human incentive alignment problem. Any certification program, interview farm, or bootcamp that makes more money when they produce more candidates will make quantity the goal, not quality. If you can figure out that problem, maybe there's a niche. Otherwise, it puts us right where we already are.

The trainings and certifications won't let you bypass technical interviews though. There's still inherent distrust of them. We need a credential good enough that companies can trust.

Most of the recruiters I deal with are only doing screens and maybe soft interviews -- I may be on the lower rungs of the ladder here though.

For the last point, I'll offer Offensive Security as an example because I have one of their certs. OS wants people in its programs as we're a source of income, obviously, but they don't get revenue from people passing. In fact, they get more revenue if you don't pass because they charge per attempt. They offer training for organizations too.

They also act as a verification service for their certifications:

https://help.offensive-security.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040...

The idea for a programming credential would be the same: an organization that offers training, doesn't make money on pass rates, and also is a trusted point of verification.

Some companies have offered to do technical interviews, then pass you to employers. This is a start, but it isn't industry wide.

Maybe run the testing and evaluation side of things at cost. The certifiers instead get profit from companies that subscribe to their certification verification program. There's a small fee for the employer to verify someone's certification is genuine. Part of the employer's contract with the certifier would be that anyone the employer hires who has been verified to be certified, when they've been employed at the company for a year, they owe the certifier a bonus. There's a second bonus at five years and that's the end of the payments. The certifier is incentivized to only certify workers who have genuine skills as those are the ones most likely to hit the one and five year milestones. Talent acquisition is expensive, as is employee turnover, so employers will not have an incentive to layoff employees right before their employment anniversary in an attempt to avoid the fee they owe the certifier. They'll find that the anniversary fee is a small price to pay for having been matched up with an employee with the actual skills the employer needs.

They are useless because the bar is so low that anyone can pass. Your credential only has value if few people can obtain it.

> We need a credential that counts as passing a technical interview, so we don't have to take these tests for every single job that we apply to.

We could call this a degree, perhaps in computer science?

This seems like an excellent idea!

Unfortunately my CS degree from a very-top school (CMU) counts for nothing in so many companies.

But they do forget how to program. Or maybe they never knew and got lucky to get the previous job.

Why don't they just use the computer science GRE?

I took a brief look at a CS GRE test prep book from a Google search, and it probably doesn't cover the same things leetcode does, nor does it really test code writing ability (because it's multiple choice):

https://people.engr.tamu.edu/d-walker/Quals/GRE_CompSci_1.pd...

The CS GRE was discontinued nearly a decade ago, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/176c13/d...