

Ask HN: Best resources for coding challenges? - k__

Dear HN,<p>I read about this recruiting practice of strange coding challenges that have no direct relation to the position applied for, but till yesterday I didn&#x27;t encountered one of them myself.<p>I designed and programmed software for years, but still was baffled by the challenge I encountered.<p>It wasn&#x27;t hard but I didn&#x27;t expect it and the time I had for it made me rather nervous. After I submitted it, I thought about every piece of code I now would write differently and felt rather ashamed.<p>If I practiced such things more often, I would probably be more calm in doing them under pressure.<p>Now I&#x27;m asking you, what is the best resource for such challenges?
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udo2
It's probably a contrarian opinion in the age of coding katas, dojos,
challenges, courses, "academies", and such but I think the best way to improve
is to actually work on things that interest and challenge you personally.
You'll always be your own harshest critic, but at least when using your own
projects for training you're working on something real and without the
artifice of challenges someone else thought up.

If you were baffled by the challenge itself, that's probably because you never
encountered that particular problem before. This is fine, everybody's got to
make decisions about how to spend their resources, including what to learn. If
you feel this was something _you should have known_ how to do, take it as a
sign and go find out more about that subject.

On a larger scale though, I think interviewing coding challenges are starting
to have the same drawbacks as the millions of, say, Javascript coder academies
out there: it's that form of artifice which distances the challenges from the
real world. Instead, and I believe increasingly, they measure something
entirely separate from solving actual programming problems: solving coding
challenges in a vacuum.

It's becoming our industry's form of standardized testing. You can learn to do
well at it, but beyond a certain level of expertise I'm skeptical this is
coupled to actual engineering prowess.

You might say: "okay, but if this is a skill I need to know in order to get
hired, so be it", and that's a valid perspective. Google will guide you to a
plethora of training sites. But I'm beginning to wonder if it makes sense at
all to work for people who expect standardized outcomes in these tests.

~~~
k__
It was more the algorithmic part that challenged me. The rest was easy, but I
lost so much time and nerves to the algorithms, that I didn't deliver the
needed quality on the rest.

I don't know how much those things really have to do with the jobs. Like I
said, I worked for years as a dev and shipped many products. But they were
more of a architectural challenge than an algorithmic.

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CzechsMix
I've used the following:

Project Euler, TopCoder, /r/DailyProgrammer

