As someone who maintains a relatively popular open-source project on Github for the past 5 years I am becoming increasingly skeptical of companies who ask me to do a coding assignment as part of the interview process. And I do interviews quite often, for one reason or another.

Most companies will ask me to do a coding assignment after the initial phone/skype chat, if successful. Others will send a coding assignment right away after just reviewing the application, even before a phone screening. There are organisations who claim that they are receiving a large amount of applications and so this is a practical solution for them. I’ve got such an assignment following an application for a full-stack developer position at CERN, which evidently was not successful.

However, in my experience, the most common scenario is when I receive the assignment after the phone interview. And the said assignment need not take more than 3 or 4 hours usually. There is even a platform to facilitate this — coderpad.io, a website which aims to provide a live coding environment specifically designed for job interview assignments. Fair enough, the companies need a suitable and effective tool to hire the best candidates they can find, and faster. Right? Wrong.

We don’t need coding assignments anymore. Coding assignments are a thing of the past and in most cases they don’t prove much, as they are quite generic and most of them lack innovation. Even the CERN assignment, of which one would have high expectations, was rather disappointing in terms of creativity. I still failed it though, but that is beside the point.

Now we have a much better tool at our disposal. And it works well for everybody, not just for the companies hungry for talent. It’s the Open-Source community. Instead of the coder doing an assignment which has a high chance of being rejected and thus wasteful, organisations need to simply pick an open-source project on Github and ask the interviewee to submit a pull request for it. Even better, it could be a project that the company uses. Clearly this much more beneficial for the interviewee in the event of an unsuccessful interview as well. In the regular assignment situation, the coder will at best receive a few lines as feedback which is unlikely to be very useful.

Coding assignments are also alienating, stressful, inconclusive. We don’t need that in our lives. Pull requests are useful, empowering, inclusive and transparent. And a platform like Coderpad could work really well here to facilitate things. As a maintainer, I would be very happy to assist them with indicating which Github issues would be most suitable as an assignment.

I recently was in a situation where I have received a 3 hour assignment. This was my response:

Hi {Intervieweer Name},

With respect, 3 hours is quite a long time to ask an interviewee to spend for a coding test. I mean, I have been developing this open-source project for the past 5 years. All the source code is on Github at […] and to be frank I think that is a good indication that I am able to code in Javascript. You can check the source code for {Project}, it has also around 85% test coverage, most of the codebase is written (or reviewed) by me. In addition, you have my CV with presumably enough experience and academic qualifications for this position.

So it is up to you now to decide if you want to move forward with this. Personally, I don’t think it would be very productive for me to spend 3 hours to do a coding test for a job interview when I could very well spend that time fixing some bugs for an open-source project that the community can benefit from. I hope you understand.

Regards,
Andrei