Saw this in my feed a little while ago, and honestly if a company is using how you format code/your code formatting style to select people then I don’t think I would want to work with them in any case. That is because if they are that nitpicky about stuff that doesn’t really matter instead of focusing on actual skills then who know what kind of mess you will be dealing with when you are in their system.
Who would you choose?
I get it that you would want a consistent coding style across the codebase and there are scripts out there that let you reformat the code to the ‘correct’ style at the click of a button. In one of my previous companies I worked with 2 coders who each preferred a different code formatting style and had written macros in Emacs to format the code to their liking. Whenever each of them worked on a file, they would change the formatting and then make the changes. It was a bit annoying because when they changed the formatting the entire file would show up as modified when looking at the diff between the versions making it harder to code review. But that was still better than working with people who will judge your code quality on the formatting you used in it.
Also, for the record I prefer the 2nd option for code formatting 🙂
What do you think?
– Suramya