I sent a copy of my resume to HubSpot, and one of their talent acquisition people got me on the phone to talk. It sounded like a potentially good fit, and I was invited to take the HubSpot coding challenge.

Which I did.

Online coding assessments are all the rage for certifying a software developer's skills during the hiring process. Don't get me wrong, this is a much better system than what we used to have. A decade ago, all we had were red-flag job ads, whiteboard coding, and buzzword bingo. Back then, oh what I would have done for a chance to develop some actual code—even on a toy problem—just to demonstrate my programming prowess. And these systems are absolutely an improvement. We're on the right track.

The most well-known system is HackerRank's, but there are several others as well. I'm picking on HackerRank in the title, but I'm actually commenting on all the online coding assessments (including HackerRank). They all work approximately the same: They usually involve a number of multiple-choice questions followed by a couple of programming challenges. In the programming challenges, you can generally choose from a list of programming languages, and your solutions will be judged against pre-written test cases, some of which you might not have access to.

These assessments are much better than what came before, but they still suffer from fundamental pitfalls that you ought to be aware of, whether you're a job-seeker or a hiring manager. They're saddled with the fallout from an educational system that teaches memorization and compliance (rather than innovation and initiative), and they probably don't reflect what you want to be looking for in a software engineer.