My favorite kind of interview question/challenge is anything that is highly practical for the job. At the current company I work, the coding test/interview challenge was to design and implement an API very similar to the core functionality of the actual product. It’s fair, tests for skills relevant to the job, and is much better than irrelevant silly brain teasers and cs questions, I feel.

In terms of specific questions, one of my favorites is one that one of my colleagues suggested I ask to potential candidates: describe what you think your biggest failed project/task was in your engineering career, and what happened/what you learned. I think it’s a good reflective question that can tell a lot about someone.

Interviewer: How will you solve the travelling salesman problem?

Me: *explains the solution on whiteboard*

Interviewer: It is slow. Can you do it in linear time at least?

Me: It is NP hard so it is not possible. For a restricted case, it may be possible

Interviewer: You are stupid. Do not apply again.

Please make an entire webshop with animated shopping cart in react + redux within a week 👍

We will then reject you for the position and thank you for rewriting our tech stack for the frontend 😂 K THX BAIII

It was for a job interview, I wouldn't specify what the challenge is but they said I could use any language I want; I chose Python. They said I failed the coding interview because it was not Java.

Interviewer : So what frameworks and library you usually use?
Me : i use volley for networking, gson for parsing, livedata/architecture components for architecture and observability , room for database and java for app development

I : ok so make this sample app using retrofit for networking, moshi for parsing, mvrx for architecture , rx for observability , sqldelight for db, dagger2 and kotlin for app dev. You have 8 hours

Me :(wtf?) But i never used those libs or language!
I : we just want to check how easily you adapt to different surroundings.

Me : -_-

Honestly i don't know of it was a great experience or a bad one . I was stressed the whole time but was able to adapt to almost all of those libraries and frameworks.
At the end i got selected but decided not to go for those ppl. That was just a lucrative opening of a venus fly trap, they would have stressed the hell out of me

My first ever interview for a developer position involved waking up around 9am to a call from an unrecognized number.

I answered and realized it was someone from a startup I applied to just a day before.

Instant phone interview with tech questions on React and Angular, and I BS'd my way through it, knowing almost nothing about either. Got the job, somehow.

For my job interview, they asked me to write simple Java code to check if the string is palindrome or not! Like sir, I've prepared for advanced quick sort and all algorithms and you ask me this!! 🥺

After the technical round, HR to me. Do you have a girlfriend? If not why? People in your age probably have one.

My fav interview was at my previous job. It was a junior position. The lead was a very friendly and wise guy. He kept pushing me (positively) with subtle hint until I get a code right. After completing each problem he give me elaborate explanation about the meaning of the problem and how to approach it from other angles. It felt like I'm in front of buddha who is making me realize the inner working of the world. Didn’t get 50% of the questions right, still he recruited me because "You were very curious and you were having fun solving problems". Best one and half years of my career.

I don't like interview coding challenges. At the same time, given the skill level of some developers I've worked with who work for a contracting firm and presumably didn't get a coding test in their intervies...I understand the necessity. Some people are so bad at coding that even the simplest of coding tests can show how bad they are.

I think my favorite is being given a simple task to write code for. And that's it. No "use this specific language feature to do this specific thing". Just a task and that's it.

I got a really simple coding test once. I had to reverse a string. I could choose any language. Presumably they wanted to see loops or something, but I just used Python and did this: string[::-1]

I got the job.

Not a coding challenge, it was more of a logical problem.
"You are given 7 ball, all equal in size but one is slightly heavier than the other 6. You have to find the heaviest ball and you are allowed to use the scale only twice."

Never did programming professionally so none yet and I don't think that's going to change anytime soon 😄

For the first time apart from Data Structures and Algorithms, there was a Machine Coding round where they asked me to create a small app using any language without data persistence or GUI, to see my code designing ability, LLD, code quality, whether I can implement OOP and write modular code and to see how extensible my code will be.

I did well.

confession time:
I am php laravel developer with little knowledge about nodejs.
I got selected by one startup as nodejs developer.
frankly I am not better nodejs developer than my competition who were rejected.

I completed oral interview with my nodejs theory knowledge at a time of technical round , they gave us task to create crud with fantastic front end and nodejs mongo as a back end.

I developed front end in bootstrap but at a time of backend, I just copy paste code from github.

and changed everything variable and other proof to hide reality. in mean time other candidates were actually coding everything then I took time to understand this code and I submitted after few candidates.

in last round they ask me to explain code which I explained properly and I get salary 40k/month INR.

I know it is cheating but I wanted this job badly.

none, no matter how easy it is im gonna tense up and not think straight. Im against the standard interviewing process to begin with

So I just had this thought that nlegs.com (NSFW) kinda feels like a test.

When I first found it, and it still is, the front-end/layout is basically a BootStrap grid.

It was super easy to scrape.

Then over time, the owner made small tweaks and changes which felt like "oh you guys are still here.... let's make it a bit harder and see who drops out next"

So it got more and more tricky to scrape or fool the site.

But it never became completely unfoolable. I figured if he signed up for Cloudflare, that probably make it impossible to scrape....

Well I was curious today so did a whois.... And one of the things it mentioned was Cloudflare...

So now I'm like.... Hmmm.... What???!!! Ok.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The one that got me to my current employment. I was working as a sysadmin and was trying to switch to dev. I'd tried one interview in another company and failed it miserably. I was soooo nervous I was literally shaking. And I think I failed every possible dev question. Ffs I couldn't even remember how to swap 2 variables! Yes, I was THAT nervous. Bcz I needed that spot so much.

After that I decided to cool down for a few weeks. Then my current employer's hr reached out and asked to come over. I did. We had a chat with HR and they told me I'll be asked to do a homework task. Surely I was okay with it! They sent me the task via email, but smth [I don't recall what] happened at my sysadmin work and I was extremely short on time. I missed the homework due date ofc. A few days later they reached out to me and gave me another week. I missed that too. Again I got a call from them and I was asked what was the problem. I explained I don't have time atm and mentioned that it might be better to skip this oppurtunity for me. That it might be bettet for them to hire someone else.

To my surprise they did not back off. They kept talking, one thing led to another and somehow they made me commit to arrive to their office to do the homework task.

I was startled. I would have bailed on me if I were them... They didn't..

They didn't give up on me
they are amazing

so.. I took a drink tonight, and finished watching some devRant posts about alcohol and some funny stories..
whats wrong with u guys 😂

It was back in 2010, they told me to build a simple CRUD system, habe me 2 hours, just to see the code structure/style.

Was it hard? No! I handed it in after 30min, the remaining time I got to talk to the devs. Was nice. No bullshit, no whiteboard, just a laptop and an IDE.

Initialize a collection, store values in it and then filter values out of it and none of your code may be inefficient, such as having O(n)² performance. Your code must also pass the predefined Test Suite. You have 15 minutes.

This sounds simple but it's not.

This was for a Google-type company that has high standards.

How to swap two variables’ values without a temporary variable. I failed :/.

There's no favourite coding challenge for me. Of course I do them when I'm asked to but I don't think anyone can derive how Well someone works from these short toy challenges.

I once had a proper prototyping Challenge that was really fun. I had to Work on it in advance to the interview. I had to define the scope and how much time I will spend in it in advance and then explain and defend the scoping and all technological/architecture decisions and handle proper criticism in the interview. No bullshit coding challenges Had to be solved :)
I think these prototyping challenges will Tell you way more about an applicant and his worth as a dev than those little challenges ever could.

Create an animation of tree traversals.
I could use any framework or library, but I just used plain html/css/js.
It was fun.

none so far, they were all generic

Only one, they gave me an example of a tiny service from their system to see how I would solve their problem as for the rest are about right a sort algo, find x from y, lame old questions .....

Write a C# WPF app that does ...

Or any hands on actual coding instead the pure Algo BS u will never use on a job. And when is you use will probably be conceptual or oh... This problem is better solved using ... Because it's already ...

As for interviews I don't do go-to them any more... Guess I'm disillusioned... It maybe just lost hope a don't give a fck anymore. Job paid the bills and I'm like the most experienced so meh....

wk192: None. I was never asked to do a single coding challenge in any job interview. I had three successes and a bunch more interviews without programming anything in the interview or having ever shown any previous programming projects. I really wonder what criteria are important to companies hiring software developers if not how well they are at developing software.

Goroutines and channels. I never wrote objectoriented code so easily

I wonder How people complete the whole computer science in 4 years. For me it feels about 4 decades. Any thoughts about it ?

I had to make a ruler grid for an existing horizontal scroll website project, but I had the job basically for sure.
I came up with a solution which included PHP-generated SVG embedded in HTML.
It was a new thing to me at that time, but a cool challenge.