A Programmer Explained to Me Why I’m an Idiot and a Moron in the Same Sentence
Tests rule out the people who think outside the box.
I was an idiot and a moron. A self-help junkie like me should have known better.
We met for the first time. He works client-side looking after teams of engineers. I work with clients like him to help them build engineering teams at scale and expand through mitosis (members of a successful engineering team branch off and create new teams).
I explained to him how his employer wanted me to code test any new engineers with HackerRank and I agreed with their decision. (This was ironic because I’m not a coder and can’t read code.) It was at this point where he got fired up. His face turned a little red.
“You are an idiot and a moron if you think you can code test engineers to try and find good ones.”
I was a little taken back. We weren’t even friends yet. Should I be offended? He continued:
“Code tests rule out the people who think outside the box.”
He started rattling off example after example of gun engineers who performed poorly on a HackerRank test. He showed me the work these engineers produced and then their poor HackerRank results. This next line got me:
