Ask HN: What is your opinion on timed code quizzes before or during interviews?

I&#x27;d walk out, as a developer, I&#x27;d likely laugh too. Well I&#x27;d laugh, then see you were serious and walk out.<p>You want me to code fast, I&#x27;ll code fast. My code will be shit, but it&#x27;ll work. It won&#x27;t scale, it&#x27;ll roll over and die in 3 months when we make the slightest change.<p>As an interviewer its idiotic. What are you testing? If I&#x27;ve memorized the question you&#x27;re asking me? Or seeing how fast I can think on my feet. If its the former, what? If its the later, there are other ways to test this, that make sense.<p>If you want to see how a developer thinks on his feet, give both of you a problem you haven&#x27;t seen before, prototype a data structure to solve this problem. Work together interviewer and developer, you&#x27;ll learn each other&#x27;s thought process, and a bit about the company dynamic. It&#x27;ll take longer, but more information is gained via osmosis.

Developer: I took one of these 20 minute timed tests, where the interviewer had access to my screen for the entire duration. There were 3 modules, one CSS&#x2F;HTML, and the rest JavaScript. I knew there wouldn&#x27;t be enough time to finish all three of them.<p>I thought it was the least effective way to probe my skills as a developer. It would have been better to talk about how I would solve those problems instead of a timed test.

Developer: At least they are trying to see code which is better than nothing but there is a very good chance that their hiring pipeline is messed up so be wary.<p>Interviewer: There is no correlation between people&#x27;s ability to take timed code quizzes and good developers. It causes undue pressure on some candidates for no reason and we should never have it be part of the process.

Developer: If it&#x27;s for a &quot;commodity&quot; programming position (follow instructions, crank out kloc) then maybe it&#x27;d be relevant, but those kind of &quot;code monkey&quot; positions are actually pretty rare.<p>In the vast majority of jobs (IMHO), the speed at which they can write a given function&#x2F;whatever has almost no bearing on their overall productivity. Most coders only program a few hours a day anyway (see: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8131116" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8131116</a>) ...it&#x27;s what they&#x27;re doing the <i>rest</i> of the time that matters most.<p>If you have a need to do a timed test, at least do it in pseudocode. That way you&#x27;re just testing the applicant&#x27;s logic, instead of how much [php&#x2F;js&#x2F;ruby&#x2F;whatever] they happened to memorize over the years.

Developer<p>I avoid the things these days. It&#x27;s not about being <i>fast</i> it&#x27;s about getting the job done. Quizzes don&#x27;t demonstrate such things.<p>They might be okay for graduates, or low end candidates, but for experienced folk it&#x27;s irrelevant.

Developer: If they&#x27;re reasonable in subject scope, length and proportional to the rest of the interview (not to mention the level - you probably don&#x27;t want to do a code quiz for a senior position: that&#x27;s a serious red flag, highly correlated with micromanagers), why not.<p>Interviewer (many hats here): A _brief_ quiz is a useful highpass filter for junior-level positions (&quot;Ugg set clock on microwave! Ugg programmer now!&quot;), and a possible conversation starter (&quot;what, why &amp; how&quot;).

Developer: I welcome the challenge. I would rather do a timed code quiz than the &quot;how many tennis balls can fit in a school bus&quot; type questions.<p>Interviewer: I wish we did more of this in our hiring process. A written code sample is a great jumping off point for discussing how and why the applicant makes decisions while coding.

Developer: Is the job for someone who spends their days doing timed code quizzes?<p>If it is then it is acceptable. If it isn&#x27;t then it seems asinine.<p>For me myself, if I had a literal clock there ticking down then it will take me twice as long and I&#x27;ll do a much worse job. There&#x27;s a lot of people who cannot program under high stress situations like that (and a job interview is naturally quite stressful already). So expect to dismiss a lot of otherwise great candidates.<p>Maybe the interview process should be based around the job you&#x27;re employing them for rather than for trivial games that only test someone&#x27;s abilities at completing those exact type of task. Crazy I know, but maybe just maybe it makes sense.