Frustrated with Coding Challenges! Highly Subjective!
I just got interviewed at Lyft for their Self Driving Team. It was an initial coding challenge. We had gone over first 35 minutes over my background and projects. And the last 25 minutes the interviewer gave a coding challenge to solve. I couldn’t finish within 25 minutes. Wrote 75% of the code. However, right after the interview, I spent time, cleaned the code, added error checking, tested and made it super robust and checked into my Github. I sent the Github link and the code to the interviewer. Next day I got the mail that I was rejected.
I was really frustrated. Looks like I was only measured on a coding problem based on my ability to code within the given time. All my 14 years of experience, skills, passion and patents are thrown into trash. I strongly believe only candidates who practiced for interview for weeks or recently coded the same challenge can crack within the 30 minutes. In reality, it definitely takes more than 30 minutes for someone to think and consider all error checking functionality to implement and test with high quality. I would agree speed is important but when we build safety critical systems where peoples lives matter, I would vote for quality over speed, and its OK to take little longer time.
I would be skeptical about trying Lyft self driving cars if they rush to beat competition and don’t have appreciation for quality, safety and security. So, good luck to Lyft team in building self-driving cars.
Do you disagree with my thoughts? Don't you think these interviews are highly subjective?
comments
It's honestly so retarded. Having the stroke of luck of having seen a question before gives you the speed edge and can literally mean tens of thousands of $ salary wise.
I agree, it is so dumb.
There are other rounds of the interview process that measure the arguably more important things such as experience (through design), passion (through the behavioral interview round), etc.
It's not a perfect process but it's fairer than the alternative you're proposing, IMO.