Bug squash: An underrated interview question

I like this approach far, far more than coding tests!

> It’s fun. It’s fun in the same way an escape room is fun. It’s fun because of the dopamine you get when the test suite blinks green.

Keep in mind that for lots of people in a job interview setting (even excellent candidates) this is not fun, this is stressful. It may be fun on the job or at home, but the stress of a job interview both eliminates any "fun" aspect and makes even simple tasks more difficult. Just mentioning that to encourage some amount of empathy and understanding for the candidate.

Although I like this interview question, it has a big downside. You make the candidate spend quite a lot of effort while you as an interviewer don’t learn much. The answer to “Can this candidate find and fix this bug?” is not necessarily equal to “Is this candidate a good expansion of the team. What do they bring that we need?”

This is one of the interview questions at Stripe, and I agree that it was the most "fun" part of the interview (It is still pretty stressful giving an interview, but magnitude times much less so than converting a BST to doubly linked list, and converting it back )

I was thinking, wouldn't it be fairer to do the test in an online code sandbox where being able to build and install isn't an issue? Then I thought, isn't letting the candidate use their own machine and debugging tools about as biased as hiring a limo driver based on how fast they can drive their own car? It does tell you who's a real "car guy" or "Unix guy", it just has a slight disparate impact by screening for people with money and hobbies. I mean, I think you should be allowed to hire these people because they will be better at the job, but hopefully they could also show that in a sandbox test.

> If you chose a language for a very good reason, then it's not a con to filter out those who aren't familiar with that language enough to debug an issue in it

The language is based on/chosen by the candidate. We want to map the candidate to whatever language in our repository of "this question in different langs" is closest, to control for the candidate's familiarity as much as possible.

If you're screening to only candidates who can code in the language your company primarily works with, you're missing good candidates. The best are going to be able to pick up a new language rapidly, particularly if your language is a mainstream one that's probably imperative or OO-ish, or both; adding a non-esoteric language to one's repertoire is just not that hard a thing to do. But in the interview, I don't want them struggling with syntactic bull, as it's not a useful signal; I want to know how they think, whether they've seen code before, and can they reason from problem statement to debugged bug.