Seriously, been working as a software developer for 9 years now and never passed a single coding test.
The jobs I got were always the ones giving me weekend projects or just no coding test at all.
I have a job opportunity that looks exciting but they sent me this coding test link and I know I’m gonna fail for sure. Any tips aside from the obvious (practicing in advance on leetcode etc)?
The test was just a set-up for free work.
No, not if they already had a “correct” solution.
It’s normal to know the answer you’re looking for before you ask the question, and they thought they did in this case.
Yes. The problem was the interviewer wasn’t prepared for a different correct answer.
I hear that accusation a lot, but I’ve never really seen a company do that. Having been in the other side of the equation many times, the effort required to review code that’s submitted, especially when you don’t know the author is probably not worth it.
The case I detailed above was a fairly isolated subsystem that didn’t really require any knowledge of their system to work on. They probably chose it because A. It was a readily available problem with an existing solution that you could reasonably expect to be solved within a couple of hours , and B. the CTO thought he had a cool solution.