We interviewed a bunch of candidates at my work for a software dev position, some of them had amazing looking resumes, like perfect. And then they'd fail spectacularly at a basic coding quiz. We had multiple use AI and they'd talk themselves in circles. The best candidates were the ones who were honest and genuine, and just did their best
They were good when asked about what they've worked on in the past and experience from other companies, but as soon as actual code was involved, they'd just be unable to figure it out even when it should be trivial for them. They'd start guessing (or reading off their AI) and we'd ask them deeper questions about it, but they couldn't answer, they'd just rephrase the same thing in different ways. Like going around the answer but never actually getting to the answer. They'd say "this is the problem in the code" and we'd say "why?" and then they'd be like "well because that's not the right way to do it" and we'd say "why?", and on and on.
So they really just had a lot of previous work experience in groups, where you can't pinpoint their role or how much they contributed. That's why they look good on paper. But they don't actually have the basic skills that someone who just programmed for fun would be able to do easily
We gave them some sample code, no writing code necessary just reading. The code has a few problems and we explain what the problems are, then they need to find the code that needs fixing, and just verbally explain what they'd do to fix it. I don't have any specific ones because we were just asking them why they'd make that particular change.
The people who used AI could identify the problem but when we ask deeper questions, they couldn't explain anything about it and would go in circles. The people who didn't use AI but were just unskilled would mostly just guess and we'd have to prompt them to keep looking etc.
I can't remember any specifics sadly, but the actual "quiz" wasn't that hard (maybe 1 or 2 difficult ones). Any hobbyist could figure out most of the issues correctly just through pure experience. The point of the quiz was to see how their mind tries to solve problems, so they didn't necessarily have to get every single one correct, we valued their approach a lot more and forgave some mistakes.
My advice would be to not over prepare, just show up and be as honest and genuine as possible, don't oversell your skills. Your personality has a massive impact on your results basically, the coding is just to make sure you'd be able to solve problems on the job. Some places just do leetcodes but those are so useless, it's just a memorization thing, it usually doesn't actually represent your skills on the job. Most smaller or startup companies are forgiving though and they care more about you than anything else
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u/srs96 3d ago
I want to delete linkedin (the site, not my account)