41–50 of 50 posts
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What does "the mistake" look like?
You can't always easily tell when someone is going to be a pain to work with on an interpersonal level.
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Real time coding interviews are really necessary to avoid hiring people who dont have basic proficiency in coding ( https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ ) The problem given in a coding interview should be a simple one and the candidate should be allowed to choose the solution language.
A simple homework assignment will do much of the same and allow them to do it at their own pace and having full access to any tool, instead of during some arbitrary time limit with someone else breathing down their neck. Or having to feel guilty about reaching for Stack Overflow and wondering how that would affect their interviewer's opinion of them. Sure they could Google the question but then give them something th…
Who is paying for that time?
As someone who has interviewed a lot of people; if I am going to ask someone to perform some coding, I offer them the fact that my entire TEAM (5+ people) will be there for them to ask questions of.
That is us being serious about hiring. It isn't just a single person who is interviewing - but a large amount of the engineering team.
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> or have somehow entered into an alternate fairytale land where everyone is honest This won't likely be a popular answer, but more likely than what you described above is simply that you don't know how to weed out the bullshit a candidate might spew without shoving a code editor or dry erase marker in their hand. It's perfectly understandable that many don't have this skill as it's rarely ever taught before you star…
> you don't know how to weed out the bullshit a candidate might spew without shoving a code editor or dry erase marker in their hand I'm sure we could figure out a non-code non-marker way. I'm also sure I could figure out a commute involving only right turns. But why would I arbitraily constrain my solution like that?
The reason to "constrain your solution" is to not rule out very capable candidates who have "stage fright" and not offend other very capable candidates who take offense to your crappy brain teaser problems that don't actually reflect anything they'd do in their real job.
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> you don't know how to weed out the bullshit a candidate might spew without shoving a code editor or dry erase marker in their hand I'm sure we could figure out a non-code non-marker way. I'm also sure I could figure out a commute involving only right turns. But why would I arbitraily constrain my solution like that?
Continuing your strained analogy, so because you didn't want to make only right turns, everyone else should spend an extra 10min in traffic each morning? The reason to "constrain your solution" is to not rule out very capable candidates who have "stage fright" and not offend other very capable candidates who take offense to your crappy brain teaser problems that don't actually reflect anything they'd do in their real…
I should hope the coding exercise would reflect what they would be doing! Finding logic bugs, munging data, using appropriate data structures, recognizing recursion, etc.
If coding isn't a significant portion of the job (researcher, manager, etc.) then yeah, don't put it in the interview.
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"Generally speaking, I can tell within 5 minutes who is a great candidate." How do you validate that this is true?
Based on the performance of the people I have hired over the years. Of course, there is always the possibility that a candidate might have been great and this was not discovered by my approach, but I think this is an inherent risk.
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Continuing your strained analogy, so because you didn't want to make only right turns, everyone else should spend an extra 10min in traffic each morning? The reason to "constrain your solution" is to not rule out very capable candidates who have "stage fright" and not offend other very capable candidates who take offense to your crappy brain teaser problems that don't actually reflect anything they'd do in their real…
> don't actually reflect anything they'd do in their real job I should hope the coding exercise would reflect what they would be doing! Finding logic bugs, munging data, using appropriate data structures, recognizing recursion, etc. If coding isn't a significant portion of the job (researcher, manager, etc.) then yeah, don't put it in the interview.
Sadly, I have not found this to be the case almost anywhere I have worked or interviewed (seems to be especially relevant the bigger the company is).
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Probably ORTC (O is for "object), a similar but different tech Microsoft is pushing.
Then why Chrome?
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Yup, I don't enjoy coding interviews, but the number of people I've interviewed with ostensibly many years of programming experience who can't actually write some basic code with a for loop and a couple of variables makes me extremely hesitant to hire without a coding interview. If you haven't run across people like this yet, you simply haven't done enough interviews yet, or have somehow entered into an alternate fai…
> or have somehow entered into an alternate fairytale land where everyone is honest This won't likely be a popular answer, but more likely than what you described above is simply that you don't know how to weed out the bullshit a candidate might spew without shoving a code editor or dry erase marker in their hand. It's perfectly understandable that many don't have this skill as it's rarely ever taught before you star…