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Remember that in other fields like medicine, finance, academia, and law, getting in involves 5+ years of hoop jumping and commitment signaling that have nothing to do with the final job. We are blessed.
True, but someone with 10+ years in those fields doesn't face an interview asking them to prescribe treatment for a cold or explain the difference between civil and criminal law.
Remember that in other fields like medicine, finance, academia, and law, getting in involves 5+ years of hoop jumping and commitment signaling that have nothing to do with the final job. We are blessed.
Remember that in other fields like medicine, finance, academia, and law, getting in involves 5+ years of hoop jumping and commitment signaling that have nothing to do with the final job. We are blessed.
True, but someone with 10+ years in those fields doesn't face an interview asking them to prescribe treatment for a cold or explain the difference between civil and criminal law.
Remember that in other fields like medicine, finance, academia, and law, getting in involves 5+ years of hoop jumping and commitment signaling that have nothing to do with the final job. We are blessed.
I'm fine with tests, but only if companies pay a standard fee (say, $100) for a dev's time. If a company doesn't respect your time during the interview process, it probably won't while you're on the job.
Uh.. just about every company i've worked at in the last 20 years has had little to no documentation and the guy who last touched the code left already.
> This is like asking a Ruby developer to debug PHP as a test of flexibility. Sounds like an OK test to me. Great (senior) developers should be able to do that kind of thing. Categorizing yourself exclusively as "a Ruby developer" is a career trap.
> When was the last time you had to debug an ancient codebase without documentation or help from a team? Is this a joke?
So we should stop the coding challenges, stop LeetCode, stop whiteboarding, stop profiling candidates, stop asking for their GitHub page. How is hiring supposed to work then? Just post the contract online and the first one to mail it back gets the job? I like live coding challenges, something like a ~2 hour pair programming session, ideally modifying an existing project. I invest as much time as each candidate, while…
If I can’t do that, I ask to see their prior work.
Good programmers have usually written a lot of code. Having them walk through and explain it usually gives a good idea of what they can do and how they think.
Sometimes you meet a programmer who only works on proprietary code and can’t share it.
In that case I ask them to explain the design of something similar, and write a modestly sized example of a component of that system. Watching them in their own dev environment for 30 minutes usually tells you all you need to know.