Ask HN: Can you actually get a dev job without doing a stupid quiz?
I&#x27;m a bit confused by your reference to HackerRank -- is not &quot;extract max value without a binary search tree&quot; a kind of problem that might show up there? Is it that type of problem you&#x27;re complaining about, or the fact that you&#x27;ve already done enough in public that you shouldn&#x27;t have to be subjected to it again time after time?<p>If it&#x27;s the latter, a counterpoint is that doing these sorts of tests (usually not strict pass&#x2F;fail ones but ones with levels of progression or orthogonal points of detail like &quot;handles the divide-by-zero case without it being pointed out&quot;) lets me rank candidate A and B in a consistent and arguably more fair way. Sometimes A will have lots of impressive github contributions, while B will have nothing but schoolwork to discuss. Personally I&#x27;m unwilling to automatically grant the job to A on such a basis as publicly available work artifacts, or indeed anything on their resume (such info probably made it easier to get to the interview stage, of course) so I test A and B the same way. I might expect A to do better, but I give B the chance anyway, and B sometimes does <i>way</i> better. If A&#x27;s past work&#x2F;volunteer experience isn&#x27;t directly related to the jobs which they&#x27;ll be asked to do, how valuable is it? I think minimal. (It may become more valuable in the future, but such hidden future utility applies just the same to B, just in likely less obvious places such as the ability to read a crypto paper and pump out exploit code in a couple days rather than a month or two.[1])<p>All that said, I&#x27;d love it if I could just give (and as a candidate, receive) a certified IQ test (or perhaps the <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wonderlic_test" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wonderlic_test</a>) and OCEAN personality test once every n years that can be reused. A lot of jobs don&#x27;t require anything else but &quot;smart and gets things done&quot; (i.e. high enough IQ and trait conscientiousness). Maybe something fizzbuzzy in addition in order to lower job onboarding costs, though you&#x27;ll find anecdotes of companies hiring smart people who couldn&#x27;t program and successfully training them &#x2F; otherwise supporting their education to become good programmers.<p>My advice for finding a less-BS job besides the already-linked no-whiteboards repo (which is a bit suspect since I know at least one company on the list shouldn&#x27;t be in general) is to find one that isn&#x27;t in high competition from candidates (they&#x27;re more likely to shorten the process to find someone good enough, i.e. &quot;smart and gets things done&quot;) or one with a very defined job role (in which case they&#x27;ll test you on that knowledge specifically if your public contributions don&#x27;t make its presence evident rather than give the usual generic quizzes that sort of act as proxies of IQ or ability to do real non-quiz work).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sockpuppet.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;06&#x2F;the-hiring-post&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sockpuppet.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;06&#x2F;the-hiring-post&#x2F;</a>