I Failed My Coding Assessment and still got an Offer — Here is how it happened

Coding assessments have become very popular in recent times. A friend of mine who works at IBM was totally clueless when I asked him about how he prepared for their backend software engineering coding assessment, because even though he interviewed for the position merely a few years back, he did not have to do a coding assessment as they were not part of IBM’s application process. Well, IBM and a lot of other companies have since adopted this assessment style as part of their interview process if not their first screening for technical applicants.

Companies have a mark that applicants must hit in other to move on in their application process. For some companies, this mark might be passing all test cases while others might consider other factors beside the number of test cases passed. Regardless of what metric a company uses, it is rare for an applicant to advance to the stages after the coding assessment without passing any of the test cases, or so we’ve been told.

I have experienced just about any of the situations one can find him/herself in with a coding assessment. There have been times when I passed all the test cases on a coding assessment and still got reject (read about it here). There was also a time when I didn’t pass all the test cases in a coding assessment, advanced to the…