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wolco | 5 years ago

Are you sure? I mean the 10 years of success spent over various companies projects on resumes have a high false rate because after they took your coding test they didn't do as well as you thought they should? Did you hire any of them and did they out perform your initial assessment.

If you didn't hire them and compare them to new hires who have bad resumes but did well on your test how would you know?

You can't objectivity judge a candidate by your test results only. Otherwise your test is just randomly filtering people. Until you do that you don't know how effective your test is. You could be flipping a coin and getting the same results.

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salt-licker|5 years ago

I’ve hired people who have not passed the coding screen (but did pass subsequent interviews) and they’ve been some of my best hires. But the type of failure really matters. Did they write generally correct code but ran out of time because the algorithm they came up with under time pressure was too complicated? Or did they fail to debug a list indexing off-by-one error, even after printing the list repeatedly? It’s sometimes a judgement call but I believe there’s a lot of signal in watching people write code in real-time