Comment by paxys
1 day ago
Stress or not, if you can't write the following code in 10+ minutes in your language of choice in an interview setting you are going to get rejected, period. Complaining and writing blog posts about it isn't going to make a difference. Instead spend your energy towards learning, and see a therapist if necessary.
int total = 0;
for (int i=0;i<arr.length;i++) {
if ((arr[i]%2) == 0) {
total += arr[i];
}
}
return total;
Agreed.
There are technical challenges that are so basic that a programmer should be able to regurgitate them even under normal-for-an-interview stress, and these are still useful filters. (e.g. For a front-end web dev role, we asked candidates to change the web page's text color. Half couldn't.) People who suffer from truly extreme stress at interviews are probably best off treating it as a medical condition to be managed.
The mistake you are making is that you are taking a LinkedIn post at face value. The LinkedIn post is rage/engagement bait.
The problems are usually harder e.g. write a Roman Numeral Converter in 25 minutes that satisfies these tests. Just setting up a test project in Visual Studio and then installing the Nuget packages can take few minutes (You will need to install XUnit/NUnit. So in reality you only have 20 minutes to do it).
One of the ones I had. I didn't understand. I sent the test to several other contractors I know after snapping a screenshot. I literally said "Am I being dumb?" to the group and all of them said said they didn't understand it either.
Sometimes the machine isn't setup the way you are used to, different version of the IDE, keyboard bindings are wrong. So you end up fighting the IDE setup or faffing with settings in the interview.
Then some of the reasons your code is rejected (especially TDD places) is because you didn't use some over-engineered language features e.g I had feedback on some code where I didn't use some Functional Enumerator Constructor thingy. Apparently using a foreach loop is too simple.
All of this adds to your stress level.