Poll of the Day > God I hate online timed coding tests

(+) Yeah! (+)

Am I just an idiot or are they bullshit? I just had to do one for a job and like it's a pretty simple question but I feel like I was either totally missing something, or they were basically expecting me to pull a bunch of stuff out of my ass. The autocomplete is terrible, no access to a bunch of common libraries, forces you into using weird coding patterns, etc. Every time I do one of these it's inevitably an incomplete mess with a bunch of comments about what I would've done if I could figure out how the hell to make things work that are really simple in my actual day to day job.

I guess it's sort of like when you'd have to do a math test without a calculator. Like okay sure it's a test, but we were always like "once we're in the real world we can just use a calculator", now this is the real world to me, give me the normal tools I use everyday instead of this bullshit.

CoorsLight posted...

Like okay sure it's a test, but we were always like "once we're in the real world we can just use a calculator", now this is the real world to me, give me the normal tools I use everyday instead of this bullshit.

i agree with this, 100%, ok?

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A cute girl approaches you at the bar. Your only intention was to grab a half pitcher and a few plates of wings before turning in after a rough day.

Do you A, deal with it and rise to the occasion, or B, retreat and bitch about it online?

None of us were "ever going to have a calculator on hand at all times" in case a life or death situation depended on knowing the height of a tree at 2pm in a field at x latitude and y longitude, but here we are.



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The problem in case anyone was wondering was that I was supposed to basically get a JSON response and parse some data out of it, then do some basic math of a subset of the data. It's dumb cause that actually is a bit more in line with real world coding than the stereotypical traverse a binary tree stuff, etc. I could probably write this in like five minutes in one of the repos I use at work, but in this case I didn't have access to the language or the libraries that make this easy and after banging my head on it I was kinda just like fuck this.

I think "take-home" untimed tests work a lot better most of the time. The only nice thing about the online IDEs is that they take care of concerns like compiling and running, but at the cost of just about everything else you get from working in your own IDE, plus they have a stupid time limit

I do not memorize the built in string functions despite using them every day ffs

On a test without autocomplete:

"FILTER OUT ALL A'S FROM THE FOLLOWING STRING"

But yeah sure not knowing that totally represents my skill as a coder I could google that in less than a second it's not like that's why I never bothered memorizing it or anything

I'm doing multithreaded programs but I'm not skilled enough to filters A's out of a string apparently

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The autocomplete was so bad it wouldn't even suggest the word String itself. I mean, that's fine, I know that one, but pretty silly you have to type it out first to find out whether or not the compiler will yell at you. No professional IDE from like the past 10+ years still works like that

CoorsLight posted...

The autocomplete was so bad it wouldn't even suggest the word String itself. I mean, that's fine, I know that one, but pretty silly you have to type it out first to find out whether or not the compiler will yell at you. No professional IDE from like the past 10+ years still works like that

You'd be amazed by the bullshit python people put up with, no intellisense on 90% of the popular IDEs.

"Oh just simply remember all 200 string commands"

If only there was an easier way!

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Sometimes I wonder if the real test is the ability to hack it and halt the timer for as long as you require.

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Lol wow, the place that I took this test for got back to me and wants to talk. I almost wish I didn't hear anything at all cause I left some harsh (but fair) comments heh heh. Awkward.

CoorsLight posted...

Lol wow, the place that I took this test for got back to me and wants to talk. I almost wish I didn't hear anything at all cause I left some harsh (but fair) comments heh heh. Awkward.

Honesty is always the best policy! Whether it gets you the job or not!

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Coding autocomplete just gets in the way. Annoying af

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Clench281 posted...

Coding autocomplete just gets in the way. Annoying af

Delete this post please

Autocomplete can be kind of annoying if you're just trying to type out int but when you don't remember the exact name of a class it's pretty handy. Or you have a ton of different libraries in your codebase and a Data object gives you a dozen results and you don't want to have to guess at which library is the right one and then copy-paste an import statement. Or you don't remember the names of every single function available in some huge class. Or when you don't want to manually indent your brackets, especially if you end up needing to wrap something in another code block which indents everything some more.

Some of that is more like auto-formatting and intellisense if you really want to split hairs, but yeah, these features exist for a reason

Nothing wrong with those auto formatting things. I just don't want shit popping up and obscuring my view of the editor. I'd be fine with one that has a shadow of a single autocomplete entry after your current position which you could cycle through, but not a pop-up window with multiple options that covers up a bunch of space.

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i'm good at tests and awful in the real world. i think the system works

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Joshs Name posted...

the system

Are you referring to the system of requiring job applicants to attend college before being considered for a given role, then mocking aforementioned system using sarcasm by saying that it works, despite your personal experiences which directly contradict this statement?
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nah def not the college route, more like tests and interviews and that part of the process

and i don't actually believe what i wrote

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Joshs Name posted...

tests and interviews and that part of the process

Oh.
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Clench281 posted...

Coding autocomplete just gets in the way. Annoying af

Your brain literally works differently than mine.

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Handy trick, code it in your fav IDE for itellisense and copy it over.

Huh, they want me to try again on a different test. It feels weird to interview with a place and feel like they actually want me there

Blogfaqs I know

Not specifically coding - but for one of my jobs I had to take a 'logic test'.

It was 100 questions long, and there was a maximum time limit of 2 minutes per question. They were all questions like:

"Four children have four different pets. Bobs pet can't fly. Valerie and Jacob's pet has hair. Debbie's pet doesn't bark. Which pets go with which kid?" With a list of pets/etc.

I was about 30 questions into it when I got distracted by my kid and a question timed out. If a question timed out - you had to start the test all over again. It was required to complete the test to apply for the job. I was like 'nah' and moved on.

Those kind of tests are the worst. If some place makes you do those it makes me question if I'd want to be there anyway