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FWIW I think you can absolutely ask practical, grounded coding questions in a coderpad environment (I believe $current_employer does).


In my 21 years in the industry, I've never seen one. Schrodinger's Code Challenge.

There's also the issue of Coderpad et al being a sterile, primitive, unfriendly environment. Not the editor or IDE a candidate is comfortable with. (Additionally, I want to know about a candidate's editor and setup. It reveals a number of things I'm interested in) And I like candidates to be comfortable to be able to be their true selves. Then there's the awkward "wait while you code," folks sitting on the other side that you don't really know, waiting or trying to make some kind of polite commentary to let the candidate know they're not being ignored or forgotten. And the candidate trying to talk through code, again with people they don't really know or have any social basis with. Coderpad is a horrible environment for interviews.

That said, I have seen VSCode's Live Share used successfully, where all parties were engaged and contributing to code in the same session. That was on an actual job-applicable, practical exercise.


Last time I had to do one of these idiotic challenges (on Triplebyte), I had an in-browser text box for code input, and a set of tests (some hidden) as the output on the right. I had no debug capability, no log, no feedback of any kind besides clicking the "run" button and seeing if tests pass or if it doesn't compile correctly. Of course I failed the challenge, because the way I write code is to take a first try, inspect errors, step through lines, and refine to get it as it needs to be. This was all impossible in this "environment" I was forced to use. Even worse, it has a timer ticking down the entire time, taunting you as you come ever closer to "failure".

What a miserable excuse for a test of my abilities. I will refuse to complete these challenges as a matter of course, and encourage others to do so as well.


What I do with such is I copy-paste the challenge scaffolding to my local IDE to make the solution. Once done I copy-paste the resulting code back to the web interface for a run. Worked well during my off-line challenges years ago. Otherwise I would refuse coding over any cr*py interface, especially live coding.


I considered that too; in this instance, I had 7 minutes to complete the "challenge". That wasn't enough time to copy over the test cases and get things configured properly for that. Still terrible that we have to even try to work around these terrible interfaces.


> 7 minutes

There are so few areas of software engineering where a time limit like that is remotely realistic. What a gas.


FWIW $employer is also okay with candidates working in their local environment if they're comfortable screen sharing. IME most people seem to prefer coderpad though, even after being nudged that using a local environment may be more helpful for writing tests.




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