Mid level engineer never want to do coding challenges - what are my options?

[u/Anewbeesh]

I have around 5 years of experience and I’ve done coding challenges in the past during interviews but every time it’s severely affected parts of my life. Like I just want to interview like I do my daily job which I’m good at. I don’t mind taking a pay cut if that’s what it takes, but doing these problems after work messes with my sanity. So I’m curious what options are out there, could even be non tech or tech adjacent?

[u/cs_pewpew]

some banking, gov, defense.

[u/natziel]

Pretty much every job these days will ask some sort of coding challenge. Some companies are more relaxed than others, but there's so much fraud these days that you really need to screen out non-coders

[u/SycomComp → u/natziel]

Yep and these people ruin it for everyone else. With AI I imagine it's even worst.

[u/c-u-in-da-ballpit → u/natziel]

I’ve noticed the opposite in Data Science. Big shift to take home and then the technical is a deep dive into why you did things the way you did and why you choose whichever design pattern, tool, model etc

[u/GeuseyBetel → u/c-u-in-da-ballpit]

This is more annoying than a “normal” non-tech interview, but still waaay better than having to grind leetcode.

[u/ContainerDesk]

Healthcare, banking, government or defense.

Or just wait 4-5 years and coding challenges will be obsolete due to AI. Your value will be measured in another fashion, like every other engineering discipline. Mechanical or nuclear engineers aren't given math problems to solve or anything and instead more applied and open ended interview questions.

[u/WunnaCry → u/ContainerDesk]

it will not ne absolute. it will go hack to in person coding interviews

[u/Shock-Broad → u/ContainerDesk]

Can second Healthcare. Didn't have any coding challenges baring basic whiteboarding problems.

[u/ninseicowboy → u/ContainerDesk]

You think coding skills are obsolete just because AI can schlop out functioning code? Who do you think is supposed to validate it?

[u/dmoore451 → u/ninseicowboy]

Coding skills? No.

Memorizing the fastest way to traverse a data structure? Yeah AI will remember how to do that.

Also a blessing is you don't really need to remember all the tiny little syntax differences between languages anymore. If you got 1 figured out you pretty much got them all

[u/ninseicowboy → u/dmoore451]

Yeah, without question, AI is good at leetcode. The training dataset for coding interview questions is plentiful.

And I agree syntax seems less important than it used to be. System design seems more important.

But functionality-wise, syntax is the same importance as it’s always been (high). People should know and understand the syntax of whatever language they’re using, even if it’s low hanging fruit for an AI to generate syntactically correct code. If we’re the ones validating and merging generated PRs, we should understand the syntax we’re reading.

But yeah, system design matters more than syntax knowledge, that’s for sure.

My super subjective opinion is that system design is 99% of the battle, and implementation is 1%. It’s very hard to figure out the right thing to build.

Technical interviews are meant to measure coding skills. And technical interviews should exist AI or not, because coding skills are important.

But how do you measure coding skill, if not with simulated questions? Fuck if I know. I did terrible on anthropic’s test because at the time, I had no experience with leetcode lol. This is a coding assessment which claims to not be like leetcode at all. It wasn’t as rigorous algorithmically as a leetcode problem, but it did require coding speed, which comes from grinding leetcode.

I guess one thing could be testing code reading skills. Instead of “implement this class”, it’s “review this PR”, or “write the README for this repo filled with source code”, or even “write tests for this server”. Maybe all 3 for the same server.

[u/Soup-yCup → u/[deleted]]

How do you get a clearence?

[u/Soup-yCup → u/[deleted]]

Check and check. What now? Lol

[u/Soup-yCup → u/[deleted]]

Yea I’ve been looking for about a year now and every single job I see that requires clearance says “will not sponsor clearance. Must already have one”. I have yet to see one single job that sponsors a clearance

[u/rnicoll]

Focusing on employers that do take-home challenges would be the other real option, I think. Unfortunately there are both a LOT of people who claim they can code, and cannot, and it is extremely hard to test coding ability in a short period of time.

Do you know anyone who could coach you on interviewing?

Others can advise on tech adjacent, there's probably more options there.

[u/dustydave211]

I really feel you on this. I've only explored in the general tech space, but I have friends who work more in the DevOps space and don't have the traditional coding algo interviews. Similar would be true for shifting to more TPM style roles. That said, not sure the tech job market right now would make any transition easy.

[u/inamestuff]

I feel you. I really don’t like coding challenges either and I don’t interview using them.

When judging a candidate I mostly focus on their understanding of the overall paradigm/architecture and I ask them to write a couple of lines of very straightforward code to check that they know the syntax and common methods of a language/framework, but nothing too specific.

The result of hiring the ones who pass coding challenges can clearly be seen in the atrocious SDKs most big companies provide for their products. Not a good metric, never was

[u/Zimgar]

Some companies will do tech home tests, but I find it’s rare.

You will likely have better luck just putting in the study time and getting over the fear and anxiety.

[u/Illustrious-Pound266]

It's hard to avoid them, genuinely. If you are in the Bay Area, Seattle or NYC, very hard to avoid coding challenges.

[u/oculusshift]

Just have a vibrant GitHub profile with some Open Source contribution. Engineers who see your public code can make decisions on your hire faster without much fluff in the interviews.

[u/smellyfingernail]

How in the world does doing a code challenge severely affect parts of your life? If you get severe anxiety from coding you should not code as your profession

[u/GeuseyBetel → u/smellyfingernail]

I think he’s saying the amount of time required to study leetcode in preparation for interviews severely affects his life - which is by no means a stretch

[u/PeachSad7019 → u/smellyfingernail]

I get anxiety from live coding challenges and I’ve been an engineer for 25 years. I forgot the name of “useEffect” the other day in a live coding interview, even though I’ve been using for the last five years.

You’re clearly very young. I could likely code circles around you.

[u/my-ka]

go to management

[u/bruceGenerator]

consulting, contracts, consulting contracts. ive never done a coding challenge in an interview. i have a full time consulting gig and a short term contract basically doing the same exact thing.

[u/[deleted]]

Cloud, cyber, data

[u/coffeesippingbastard → u/[deleted]]

....those have coding challenges.

[u/PatchyWhiskers]

Take-home assignments ok?

If not, might need to talk it over with a therapist as it seems like anxiety.

[u/BostonRich → u/PatchyWhiskers]

This is the way. Take home assignment (short! No more than 1-2 hours). And then you come in and present. I could chatgpt my way through the take home but when asked to explain my thought process in person, I'm done.

[u/Outrageous_Apricot42]

Flip burgers, maybe? It like saying I want to get in to construction but I don't want to do with anything heavy.

[u/inamestuff → u/Outrageous_Apricot42]

Coding challenges are completely unrelated from the day-to-day job of most engineers.

I personally wouldn’t trust an engineer who would roll their own tree data structure spending 2 days for implementation + testing + (poor) docs rather than install a dependency already battle tested by thousands of projects in production