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Comment by throwaway158497 | Hacker News Reader

One thing I wish people leeny (who work with hiring managers) tell companies is that as people start hitting 35-40, they dont' have same motivation to solve a trick coding question in 40 min interview. I can demonstrate that I have all the knowledge to do the problem, but if you want me to write compilable (throwaway) code with absolutely no mistakes, you have to loose some candidates. As you age, solving one off puzzles is a nuisance.

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For me it's experience in the industry. If you can see my work history, that I have >25 years in the industry, working for mid and large size companies, and lots and lots of startups, why do I need to do something like a 2-pointer / heap / etc kind of problem to prove I can code?

One of my favorite job offers was literally a conversation that played out like: Manager: Cool, come to our office and meet the team Me: Want me to prep for a tech challenge or something? Manager: Nah, you were employed by ____ for __ years -- if you were incompetent, they would have fired you years ago.

That's a cool story. However, I would say there are good reasons to test whether I can actually implement something. Mostly it tells the hiring manager about my quality of my work rather than a simple yes (s)he can do or no (s)he can't.

However, as with anything else, there are exceptions one should be cognizant of.

You're saying you can demonstrate that you have the knowledge to do the problem, but you can't actually do the problem? I'm 43 myself, it's not something I do for fun but I can certainly code up a DFS/BFS implementation or something similar in 40 minutes. With a modern IDE it's not unreasonable for me to expect it to work correctly on the first try.

Try doing it with coderpad IDE with no autcommplete. On top of that, for Java, make sure you declare everything as static, because top level class has static on it.

A reasonable middle ground is that I demonstrate I know all the concepts in the interview and I can send a fully compilable version after the interview.

>>I'm 43 myself, it's not something I do for fun but I can certainly code up a DFS/BFS implementation or something similar in 40 minutes.

Do you think you can do or have you done this? There is a difference between the two.

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