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That's more indicative of poor management and planning on the company's side than reflecting on the performance of the candidate if the time pressure is a regular occurrence.

Few people perform well under pressure. Do you want to test what is their mediocre performance under time limits like on a school test or what they are really capable of?

With this approach you will hire people able to churn out crappy but "good enough" code in the limited time. Not people who actually can do quality work.




No real company has perfect management and a lot of them have poor planning.

> Few people perform well under pressure.

Yes, but majority of jobs have some level of time pressure. That being said, there is such a thing as reasonable deadline.

> With this approach you will hire people able to churn out crappy but "good enough" code in the limited time. Not people who actually can do quality work.

Inability to perform under pressure does not imply high skill without pressure.


> Inability to perform under pressure does not imply high skill without pressure.

Ability to churn out crap in a time limit doesn't imply competence neither.


Well, it implies competence at churning out crap within a time limit, which for a lot of managers out there is precisely what they're looking for.


Well isn't that the point of these: to see that they don't churn out crap, but do a decent job.


There's never enough time or resources to do everything you want to do. Believe me; I've gone from one extreme to the other in company and team size. For any but the most mechanical of development tasks (e.g. CRUD apps), it's very common for a developer to make an estimate, realize that it was too optimistic, and then have to reduce the scope. So it's valuable for a developer to spend some time up front thinking about the design, break it down into tasks, prioritize them, and then implement the highest-priority part first. Then, even if they have to cut tasks, they can deliver something of value without having to do shoddy work.

I do think an interviewer should be completely up-front about what they want out of a candidate if they give a coding challenge that's too ambitious to implement perfectly within the time limit.




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