Finding the right person

When I ran the intern program at a previous company, we gave applicants a small coding test—not to weed people out but to ensure they had a basic ability to reason through problems. It was usually something about recursion and the Fibonacci sequence. I don’t remember the specifics because they weren’t important. In reality, the test only definitively exposed one person: someone we suspected was lying about attending a certain school. We had a hunch that anyone from that program should have been able to answer the question easily.

In my 10 years of running or participating in intern programs, the test did its job once. The rest of the time, it was inconsequential. Some candidates struggled but turned out to be great hires. Others breezed through but proved to be mediocre interns.

This is why I believe coding tests and technical assessments are largely a waste of time. In highly technical, logic-driven fields, we have a tendency to seek the “right” answer or the “right” person, as if such certainty exists. The practice of assessing people for their skills has been around for over 4,000 years, dating back to Mesopotamia, yet history shows that no assessment has ever been a completely reliable predictor of success.

Consider the professions that require rigorous exams: lawyers must pass the bar, doctors must pass medical boards, engineers must earn their licenses. Despite this scrutiny, lawyers still misrepresent clients with disastrous financial or legal consequences, doctors commit malpractice, and engineers build structures that fail. These exams are meticulously crafted by experts who spend thousands of hours refining them. Now compare that to a technical assessment thrown together in a few hours by a small group of engineers. The comparison is absurd. Asking a question and expecting a specific answer is easy. Knowing how to ask the right question is the part no one wants to admit they don’t know how to do.

I’ve worked at places that required IQ tests, undergone personality assessments to measure “cultural fit,” submitted coding exercises under strict time constraints, and even been rejected for not “going above and beyond” in an assignment that met all the given requirements. None of these methods guarantee finding the right person. They provide a false sense of security—an illusion that a hiring decision can be reduced to a simple metric rather than a nuanced judgment based on limited information.

Conversations—interviews—have always been and will continue to be the best way to determine fit. The best discussions flow organically, allowing participants to explore topics, provide relevant insights, and admit gaps in knowledge without fear. A coding test or technical assessment will never achieve that.

In an ideal world, technical assessments would accurately measure ability. But we don’t live in an ideal world. Reality is messy and full of ambiguity—ideas are drawn in pencil and later erased, sentences are written in ink and then crossed out. Data points can be flawed, and even accurate data can lead to incorrect conclusions when viewed through a faulty lens. The world isn’t binary—so why reduce hiring decisions to one?