[somedudethere]

This x100. I hate these interviews as one of the first exercises. More than once over the years I have spent 5+ hours doing a coding exercise for a company only to get a one sentence response, telling me that my "code fell short". If I pressed them further they might say my code was "hard to read" or "not what they were looking for". Vague, unhelpful, and pitiful responses. 0 interaction. No chance for a rebuttal.

Its a very lopsided assessment. Normally an in interview you can judge the company while the company judges you. That way in an hour interview you both can probably tell its not a good fit. If I'm applying and coding in python and within 15 minutes of a live coding exercise they tell me I shouldn't use list comprehensions because they are hard to read, I'd be out of there faster than I could measure. If I just spent 5 hours coding to get the same response? I'd get a little upset.

When I give critical feedback I will typically go through line by line and tell the candidate what is wrong and what is good. This is done with the candidate, since nobody is 100% correct so my judgement might be wrong and they can correct me. Many, many companies skip this crucial part and as a candidate you don't know if they are going to do it or not, so why waste your time?

[geebee]

Unfortunately, a big part of this problem is that companies face serious liability risks if they give useful feedback.

My experience with tech interviews is that they are actually exams, taken under stressful conditions, with none of the courtesies normally extended to a student.

For instance, in college, or grad school, there is a process for taking an exam. There is typically an affiliated study path, you receive feedback on your performance by a set deadline, and at a good university, someone highly competent grades your exam.

In spite of this, people often describe exams like the bar or their medical boards as the most stressful academic experience they've ever had. As programmers, we have to go up to the whiteboard regularly to take a test, or complete a take-home exam and send it off to who knows who, but we often don't know the subject that will be tested, the competence or credentials of our examiners, whether it will reeve a fair assessment, or even any assessment at all (do they just throw the thing in the trash and say "we decided to go in a new direction"? Truly I have no idea.

That's a huge problem, and it is actually outright harming our industry.

Check this article out

http://www.fastcompany.com/3043082/most-creative-people/why-...

This particular article is about hiring women, but I'm absolutely certain that plenty of men are also deterred from pursuing new tech jobs because they can't stomach the idea of another round of technical testing (with none of the factors I listed above that makes it more fair for the examinee), whether that is white boarding data structure or doing take home projects. I think a lot of people may look at this and decide to just enter a different industry altogether, and I really can't blame them.

I'm on a tangent here, but I really think that tech needs to heal itself, and we're a long way form it.

[somedudethere]

That is exactly right. Its terrifying. If if you were the first engineer at 2 successful companies and have a strong github it doesn't always seem to factor in.

I would cram for hours before my blackboard interview making sure I knew all sorts of algorithms, just in case. My friend and I would quiz each other. I don't see how memorizing tree transformations relate to a Django application.

It made it so much more difficult to move jobs.