provider of my country (De Lijn). The gist of the challenge is that essentially, you have to answer as many questions about a programming language (e.g. Python) as possible. For every right answer you get a point, for every wrong answer or a skip you get zero. So there's no punishment system. The way I look at this is that this favours quantity over quality.
It reminded me a lot of Google's Foobar challenges, which I'm also a contestant to. In that, I completed level 1 of the challenge, which had a 24 hour timer. Most of that time I spent figuring out that Google is actually still using fucking Python 2.7 for their challenges. But I hated the timed aspect of it. It felt like I'm setting myself up for a sweaty PM heavily breathing into my neck, as I'm being micromanaged into developing this new feature using an obsolete technology stack. I absolutely fucking hated it, and dropped the challenge after that.
So, timed challenges like this. The 15 minute challenge from De Lijn is minor compared to the 24 hour challenge from Google (which can extend all the way into week-long challenges in the higher levels). What are your thoughts on this approach to gauging developer skill?
Leetcode challenges?
Good question, no idea to be honest. I've seen anecdotes of challenges being mostly comprised of whiteboard questions, Tom Scott made a video about it if I'm not mistaken. I haven't accepted this challenge yet, and I'm quite aversed to doing so. I'm currently on a long-term cultural exchange to Portugal, and finalists to this challenge are invited to an in-person final challenge in November. I'm not sure if I can book reasonably priced plane tickets back by that time.
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