What is coding challenge?
Coding challenge is an organized event for programmers. The most often event organizer are companies that are actively looking for new employees to join their companies. Sometimes are started by Universities or some other associations, just for fun.
At the beginning, all of the participants are split into a small groups with the people they don’t know. Afterwards they are given some guidelines about the project that they are supposed to do and time limit to do it so. Depending on the various types of the challenge, language of programming that they are using and skills of contestants there can be different types of challenge prepared.
But against the popular opinion the main idea of such events are not organized to check who is the best at said programming language. There are much easier and the foremost cheaper ways to check the abilities of the future employees. So why they are doing it that way?
Who you are is the most important thing.
Being programmer is team effort. You can’t escape from this, that’s why we have soft like Jira and Asana. To organize and plan work for the whole team and provide transparency for everyone to monitor the level of work progression. Every week you have sprints and meetings during which you are reporting what you have done and talk with other people. That’s the reality of this job, you have to be social. And not in the minimal level.
Imagine team of people, that are working together on dozen of projects. Know each other workflow, strong and weak points and abilities. Now, out of the blue, HR have to include to this closed and well-functioning organism new person. And the have to be certain, that that person will fit. And this is why companies are interested in events like coding challenges.
What programmer need is soft skills.
During such events, they are luring for T-shaped personalities. Ideal candidates do not only have the technical abilities needed for the company development like Java or JavaScript, but particular set of soft skills, that are proving that you can be valuable part of the group.
One of such skill is ability to solve the problems conflict-free. Everyday employees are forcing to cope with new challenges, and they need to find a way to solve it. Both when writing a code and in the social situations. Especially when the deadline is coming and things are getting pretty rough.
The most important skill however, is to be communicative and have an ability to work as a team. As I said before — coding is a team effort. When working as a team, they are creating their own language and using terms that are not totally understandable to the rest of the company. Fear not! This is perfectly fine and welcome. That’s the moment when you know you, that your HR department knows what they are doing.
