https://medium.com/@stackenterprise/do-you-even-code-a5a5c951d116

You can learn a lot about a company through blogs. Not the official corporate one, but the side blogs where people really share what’s up. For example, our head of architecture blogs here, and our founder can be found here. But we also do a decent job of using the Stack Overflow blog for sharing good content, like our Engineering blog. I can’t recall my exact steps, but recently I came across the GO-JEK blog. If you are not familiar, they are an Indonesian tech unicorn that started as a ride hailing app for motorbike taxis, but now does a whole lot more through their app. Anyway, GO-JEK’s Engineering blog is super interesting. Then I read a post by Niranjan Paranjape, the CTO of GO-JEK, on why they ask for code in interviews. That is nothing earth-shattering, but then he said the following:

That apparently includes the CTO. It is not often that I come across a senior IT leader that can code. A good portion of CTO’s and CIO’s never even had a developer background, or even have a computer science degree. That is especially the case in large enterprises where the value of a leader is not in their coding skills, it is in managing budgets and delivery and teams. That being said, there are a few tinkerers. One SVP Engineering in NYC that I know still actively codes on small side projects. An investment bank CIO out of London that I work with is also a serious coding geek and is actively trying to build a great dev culture. We don’t really expect senior IT execs to open up an IDE and start committing code. But what if you just hired a programmer that could not even write a single line of code? That was the other thing that fascinated me about Niranjan’s post. About 60% of the candidates for an engineering position either do not submit a solution to a simple programming challenge or do not even know the basics. Which makes we wonder what jobs these folks are finding? There is this coding “challenge” that an engineer created several years ago based on the children’s game FizzBuzz. He wrote this as a way to weed out candidates that “struggle with tiny problems.” Even a good number of computer science grads were stymied.