Is it? I "interviewed" at one YC funded startup in particular and they asked me to build a trivially small and simple js application (even though I applied for a DevOps position, but I guess devops is different for everyone...). The only communication up to this point was over e-mail and I sent a resume.
I built it. It worked. Then they said my application was not aesthetic enough and said thank you for your time.
The whole thing seemed backwards...
In my opinion (as someone who has been going through the process for a few years now throughout undergrad with internships and now looking for a full time job at the end of my masters), very few companies do the "coding" problem right.
I don't want to work for you if you ask me to write a nested for loop and regurgitate the overhead involved in searching a b-tree. I also don't want to work for you if you ask me to build a application with no pre-defined criteria.
In my opinion...the best coding question you can ask me is fizzbuzz types of questions or pseudo-code for something complex (to see if the candidate can think through the steps of solving the complex problem without having to waste the time solving it).
I built it. It worked. Then they said my application was not aesthetic enough and said thank you for your time.
The whole thing seemed backwards...
In my opinion (as someone who has been going through the process for a few years now throughout undergrad with internships and now looking for a full time job at the end of my masters), very few companies do the "coding" problem right.
I don't want to work for you if you ask me to write a nested for loop and regurgitate the overhead involved in searching a b-tree. I also don't want to work for you if you ask me to build a application with no pre-defined criteria.
In my opinion...the best coding question you can ask me is fizzbuzz types of questions or pseudo-code for something complex (to see if the candidate can think through the steps of solving the complex problem without having to waste the time solving it).
So far not a single company has done the below.