Sucks for today’s juniors, but that gap will bring them back into the fold with higher salaries eventually.

I used to land there a lot on my searches, but ChatGPT gives higher quality results, unbelievably. Kagi+AI goes far.

I always left it open-ended and that seemed to work. Part of the interview was seeing what they’d come up with. I’m pretty sure people always brought things they’d already written.

It never happened–since they knew in advance, they had time to whip up something cool if there wasn’t anything else. It didn’t have to be massive. I just wanted to see some clean non-trivial code and a clear understanding of how it worked. Fizzbuzz wouldn’t have impressed. :)

One of my classmates years ago loved bash. They wrote a filesystem for their OS class in Bash. It was a really, really impressive and bad idea.

But how do you handle candidates who say something like “look, there’s heaps of code that I’m proud of and would love to walk you through, but it’s all work I’ve done for past companies and don’t have access (or the legal right) to show you?”

It never once happened. They always knew in advance, so they could code something up if they felt like it.

I asked candidates to bring me some code they were proud of and teach me how it worked. Weeded out people really quickly and brought quality candidates to the top. On two separate occasions we hired devs with zero experience in the language or framework and they rocked it. Trythat with your coding interview, eh? 🙂

They most definitely do.

I don’t think it’s bad–it’s impossible to make error-free material, and it’s more error-free than not, for sure.

But other people are right: you’ll “graduate” to MDN and not look at W3 Schools again.

You can absolutely write a Star Wars knockoff, though. You just can’t call it that. There’s some gray line in there somewhere.

I’m a gray developer and nothing makes me more get-off-my-lawn than too many levels of abstractions. :)

I hypothesize the failure of AI in this arena will be due to the fact that English is a shit programming language. It can take many times the amount of English to be precise compared to the equivalent computer code.

What’s the backup login mechanism when you lose your biometric sensor? How do you pair with the new sensor?