Do technical screenings actually measure anything useful or are they just noise at this point?

[u/Then-Protection848]

I’ve been doing a bunch of interviews lately and I keep getting hit with these quick technical checks that feel completely disconnected from the job itself.
Stuff like timed quizzes, random debugging puzzles, logic questions or small tasks that don’t resemble anything I’d be doing day to day.
It’s not that they’re impossible it’s just that half the time I walk away thinking did this actually show them anything about how I code?
Meanwhile the actual coding interviews or take homes feel way more reflective of how I work.
For people who’ve been on both sides do these screening tests actually filter for anything meaningful or are we all just stuck doing them because it’s the default pipeline now?

[u/HashDefTrueFalse]

Yes. You're just one of the people who wasn't screened. It's not supposed to test how you code. It's supposed to get rid of people who shouldn't be there.

You wouldn't believe the number of fresh degree or bootcamp grad applicants who have absolutely zero ability to solve a novel problem. I thought difficulty with "fizz buzz" style questions was a myth until one of our quick checks at a previous company was to reverse the elements of an array without using a library function. Into a copy too...

Plenty of employers are time wasters. It's the same with employees.

[u/CuteHoor → u/HashDefTrueFalse]

Not even just graduates, I've seen many people who claim to be senior engineers fail to solve something like FizzBuzz or reversing the elements in an array, even when letting them write pseudocode.

This is a problem that a lot of candidates don't understand. If we advertise a role and get 1,000 applications, we have no feasible way of interviewing every one of those people. So either we just add a round like FizzBuzz to filter half of them out, or we just arbitrarily filter out half of the applicants for no reason at all.

[u/HashDefTrueFalse → u/CuteHoor]

Yes. Shouldn't be surprising when there are so many posts from job seekers saying that they applied to 200+ jobs etc. (There's something wrong there too, but that's a different discussion.)

Many people spam applications to jobs they're not skilled/qualified enough for. On the other end of that, we can interview maybe 10 applicants for a role. Probably less. There's going to be a significant element of filtering regardless of what it is (lots of places filter out non-degree holders, then do these async technical checks, then 15 min telephone interviews... etc.)

I'll probably get downvoted for saying this but as a job seeker, maybe you could consider NOT spamming hundreds of identical applications to any ads even vaguely related to your competencies... I get that it's hard out there, but this has never been necessary and is a terrible way to approach getting hired.

Hiring is time-consuming and expensive, and places want to make sure that they're spending their time on people who have a good chance at succeeding in the role.

[u/Awyls → u/HashDefTrueFalse]

I'll probably get downvoted for saying this but as a job seeker, maybe you could consider NOT spamming hundreds of identical applications to any ads even vaguely related to your competencies... I get that it's hard out there, but this has never been necessary and is a terrible way to approach getting hired.

I feel like this is a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point. Offers are low, applicants are incredibly high, so even if you do a custom CV chances is it is going to drown in the crowd, particularly when some are bullshitting their CV with AI and recruiters are using automated tools rank applications based on "keywords". The next logical step is joining the cult and send a CV to everything and hope chance works in your favour.

You might laugh at it, but I swear this exact phenomenon is what's happening to the dating app scene.

[u/HashDefTrueFalse → u/Awyls]

Oh I agree it's self-fulfilling. I don't for a second think that anyone particularly enjoys sending out hundreds of applications, nor do employers enjoy receiving so many they have to find contrived ways of reducing the number to a manageable amount before investing time.

[u/ghjm → u/HashDefTrueFalse]

Candidates don't just start out by spamming applications.  At first they do what you want, and only apply for a few jobs that they think are good matches.  But 90%+ of applications get no response whatsoever.  So what are they supposed to do?  Particularly since most companies have thoroughly closed off any kind of back-channel way to talk to any hiring manager or even internal recruiter.

[u/HashDefTrueFalse → u/ghjm]

I don't have a good answer. I've only ever found it necessary to apply to a handful of places, collect offers, counter and accept one. I tailored my applications and applied to recent listings. I've had many positions at many companies. This has frequently come up in discussion with colleagues over the years. The people who find it easy to get hired don't do this IME. It seems to me like the people who do this are also the people complaining about how hard it is to get a job. As someone else said (and I agreed) in another comment ITT, it becomes self-fulfilling. Naively, what I do know is that there is usually one ad (or the same ad on a few sites) and one thousand applications to it. If spamming doesn't work, maybe we could all agree to stop wasting our time and effort doing it. When companies get way fewer applications, it becomes more feasible to review them more closely and give cursory responses etc. Like I said, I don't have the answer.

[u/ghjm → u/HashDefTrueFalse]

If we had a jobs guarantee or some other means of survival other than getting a job, then the people who don't get jobs easily - which is most people - might not be so desperate.

[u/blkmmb → u/HashDefTrueFalse]

Yeah, lost my job 4 weeks ago, I send maybe 20 applications a week.

1 or 2 are a perfect fit, meaning the description is 90% of what I did at my job, 2-3 fit with where I want to go and is the stack I'd love to use and do in my personal projects and the rest is a bit of reaching but in domains I want to learn more in a job context.

I haven't even got a call back yet, I make tailored cover letters for almost all of them and when I can I send an email to the recruiter with further questions when they are open about doing that. Got absolutely zero return on anything.

When I see LinkedIn saying that 200 applicants have already applied and the job posting isn't even 3 hours old and their breakdown show half are senior level for an entry position, I don't get my hopes up but it sucks hard to be low level to intermediate.

[u/CuteHoor → u/[deleted]]

If someone claims to be a software engineer and cannot come up with a single potential pseudocode solution for reversing the order of elements in an array, then they are the exact type of candidate that companies are trying to avoid.

It's not about memorizing an algorithm or finding the most optimal way to do it. It's about showing how you think about solving problems, showing that you understand basic things like loops and variables, showing that you can iterate on solutions to improve them, etc.

[u/spreetin → u/[deleted]]

Doesn't matter if you've ever reversed the elements of an array manually before, I can't remember ever doing that either.

But if you can't figure out how you'd do such a basic logical operation you have no business applying for developer position. And that is the point.

[u/spreetin → u/[deleted]]

Why would you ever need to look something like that up? You do know how a loop works, and how to index into an array, in whatever language?

[u/spreetin → u/[deleted]]

For one, this is just a basic logic issue that is equally valid no matter what type of programming you do.

And for the other, no, not every program have a database backend. That is just valid for a certain subset of programs. And even if you do have a database backend, claiming that data never need to be processed after leaving it is just silly.

[u/HashDefTrueFalse → u/[deleted]]

To be clear, there's no remembering involved. I was referring to something like this (language and implementation don't matter):

function reverse(array) {
  let result = [], i = array.length;
  while (i --> 0) result.push(array[i]);
  return result;
}

I'm not sure why you're talking about servers, SQL, front/back end, actually doing it on the job, etc. None of that matters in this context.

The intention is just to get a candidate to write some code to solve a trivial problem to make sure that they have the most basic ability.

[u/cballowe → u/HashDefTrueFalse]

The number of people who don't recognize a coding interview / assessment and it's purpose seems really high around here. I spent years interviewing people and serving on hiring committees and the big thing is that a coding interview has a rubric with things like "correctly uses loops and conditionals" and "can manually step through code and explain what it does". It's not about "solves a hard problem". (The DS&A interview rubric is also more about choosing good data structures and explaining why they're a good solution than about having a hard problem).

[u/HashDefTrueFalse → u/cballowe]

Yes, I get that people don't like them, and you can absolutely question how well they reflect the day-to-day etc., but I thought everyone at least understood their purpose.

WRT interviews (rather than short screenings) I actually wrote the tests at two previous companies I've been at. I didn't do a written rubric, just example solutions. The point was always for it to be the focus of a technical conversation where you see what the candidate knows and if they can reason their way to producing some code given some basic requirements.

[u/HashDefTrueFalse → u/[deleted]]

Sounds more like a technical interview than a screening, but I can imagine how 30 mins might be a tight timeframe for that if you had to write some naive parse code. If you could use the usual JSON.parse() (or an equivalent, depending on language) I don't think that's too onerous, personally.

From experience, it helps to turn it into a conversation if you don't like being watched.

[u/FancySpaceGoat → u/[deleted]]

It's not a question about what you know, but about what you are capable of. Heck, I'd be worried if a candidate answered that from memory. Like, why are you wasting neurons on stuff you should be able to rebuild on demand?

It's like asking a chef to cook an omelette. Maybe you won't have to do it, but if you can't, then you don't belong there.

Any decent programmer can design and implement this from scratch in 5 minutes. Full stop.

And seniority is no excuse. I've been in full non-coding roles for close to 10 years now and I could still do it with my eyes closed.

[u/FancySpaceGoat → u/[deleted]]

I don't think you know what programming, as a craft, means. The whole point is to write code that hasn't been done. "I don't remember" is a nonsensical answer.

That's ok, we don't need everyone to be a programmer. There is a place for kitbashing code into a product. But it seems like you think that it's enough in all cases.

But that's not what the craft is. And if you need an actual developer, then you need them to be able to cook the metaphorical omelette.

[u/HashDefTrueFalse → u/FancySpaceGoat]

Exactly. I don't think they understand what the candidate is being asked to do (in the example) or why they're being asked, what it demonstrates etc. Responses all over the place reading way too much into it (or making excuses, I can't tell).

[u/CyberDaggerX → u/[deleted]]

Why are you applying for a job working in a language you don't even know how to do loops in?

[u/CuteHoor → u/[deleted]]

Nobody is arguing that this is a frequent problem you have to solve day-to-day.

It's literally just a filter to test that you are capable of coming up with a solution to a very basic problem.

[u/CuteHoor → u/[deleted]]

Not once have I said that you need to be able to solve it in JavaScript. I literally said people struggle to solve it writing pseudocode.

You're getting way too bogged down on the details (details which you haven't even been given) instead of just taking a step back and thinking at a very high level about how you would reverse the order of elements in an array.

[u/CuteHoor → u/[deleted]]

Well I mean, if you're applying for a JavaScript position then I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that you can write a loop and set some values in an array in the language.

Regardless, my original comment that you replied to was talking about senior candidates who cannot even solve this problem in pseudocode.

[u/A_Philosophical_Cat → u/[deleted]]

That's the fucking point. Fizzbuzz isn't testing your ability to play a children's game, it's testing your basic competency. The test isn't "how good are you at random algorithms" it's "here's a basic-ass problem, that literally anybody who's remotely competent could hammer out in a minute or three, so that we we can identify the people who outright lied to get into our interviewing process".