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Why you should refuse to participate in coding interviews

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Re: Why you should refuse to participate in coding interviews

#41

Post by hliyan »

davidbanham wrote: post #17

I think the answer to this problem is take-home coding tests. They do the best job of simulating actual working conditions and minimising associated stress and anxiety. I've had this confirmed by multiple candidates I've used this approach with. I'm actually launching a product to streamline the process if anyone is interested. https://takehome.io

I have a different approach:

Me: Are you comfortable solving a small programming problem?

If the answer is yes: Here's a simple algorithmic problem you can solve in under 20-30 LOC. You can choose any language you wish, including psedocode. You can choose to write on paper or on this PC.

If the candidate seems nervous, I leave the room for a few minutes.

It can't find you the best developers. But it certainly helps weed out candidates who talk up a storm but can't actually code.

Re: Why you should refuse to participate in coding interviews

#42

Post by davidbanham »

hliyan wrote: post #41
davidbanham wrote: post #17

I think the answer to this problem is take-home coding tests. They do the best job of simulating actual working conditions and minimising associated stress and anxiety. I've had this confirmed by multiple candidates I've used this approach with. I'm actually launching a product to streamline the process if anyone is interested. https://takehome.io

I have a different approach: Me: Are you comfortable solving a small programming problem? If the answer is yes: Here's a simple algorithmic problem you can solve in under 20-30 LOC. You can choose any language you wish, including psedocode. You can choose to write on paper or on this PC. If the candidate seems nervous, I leave the room for a few minutes. It can't find you the best developers. But it certainly helps w…

All depends on the nature of the work you're hiring for. The weakness I see with that approach is that I can't think of many workplaces where the main component of the job is solving 20-30 LOC algorithms.

The correct answer to most sorting algo challenges in the real world is some variation on "use Array.sort"

I'm more interested in how people interpret requirements, how they resource knowledge, how they architect their code, how they test it, etc.

My recently retired pet challenge was to fetch and amalgamate responses from three different, unreliable, URLs and then return them in a single JSON document. For the web developers I was hiring it worked well.

Re: Why you should refuse to participate in coding interviews

#43

Post by geebee »

davidbanham wrote: post #17

I think the answer to this problem is take-home coding tests. They do the best job of simulating actual working conditions and minimising associated stress and anxiety. I've had this confirmed by multiple candidates I've used this approach with. I'm actually launching a product to streamline the process if anyone is interested. https://takehome.io

Do read this bit about take home tests, though.

http://www.gayle.com/blog/2013/09/18/companies-who-give-cand...

No real need for me to summarize it, it's all pretty well expressed in this blog post.

Re: Why you should refuse to participate in coding interviews

#44

Post by TP4Cornholio »

geebee wrote: post #43
davidbanham wrote: post #17

I think the answer to this problem is take-home coding tests. They do the best job of simulating actual working conditions and minimising associated stress and anxiety. I've had this confirmed by multiple candidates I've used this approach with. I'm actually launching a product to streamline the process if anyone is interested. https://takehome.io

Do read this bit about take home tests, though. http://www.gayle.com/blog/2013/09/18/companies-who-give-cand... No real need for me to summarize it, it's all pretty well expressed in this blog post.

I agree with the not having it be the first step.

Re: Why you should refuse to participate in coding interviews

#45

Post by mercer »

steego wrote: post #18
steego wrote: post #7

I give coding interviews and I try to take the original concern (Questioner can't think fast enough or freezes) into account, but I can't really say with any certainty if I'm successful or not. About 10 years ago, I gave a woman a coding interview question and her hands were literally shaking. She got through it, but I felt terrible because clearly she was the type of person who gets really nervous when under that ty…

I would like to add the reason I continue to use my current method is that it creates so many diverse points of data (using that term loosely) because so much happens in the hour we're together. There is something incredibly revealing when it comes to collaboration, especially if the objective is slightly open-ended. People have very different styles of approaching ideas and a lot of the time, it's revealed when the…

FWIW, as someone dealing with pretty severe (social) anxiety, I'd go for your approach over any other if I had my choice in interview method!

Homework would be my second-favorite approach, but the reason why I prefer yours is that it would also give me a lot of insight in who I'd be working for/with.

Re: Why you should refuse to participate in coding interviews

#46

Post by davidbanham »

geebee wrote: post #43
davidbanham wrote: post #17

I think the answer to this problem is take-home coding tests. They do the best job of simulating actual working conditions and minimising associated stress and anxiety. I've had this confirmed by multiple candidates I've used this approach with. I'm actually launching a product to streamline the process if anyone is interested. https://takehome.io

Do read this bit about take home tests, though. http://www.gayle.com/blog/2013/09/18/companies-who-give-cand... No real need for me to summarize it, it's all pretty well expressed in this blog post.

That's exactly why I set a hard, verifiable time limit on my exercises. A few hours is vastly too long. I limit mine to 20-40 minutes.

Re: Why you should refuse to participate in coding interviews

#47

Post by RandomOpinion »

caleblloyd wrote: post #29
RandomOpinion wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a business opportunity here. Imagine something like ETS's system for administering the GRE: Come into a location in your city at a particular date/time, sit down at a computer pre-loaded with various editors / IDEs for common languages, and run through an 4-hour coding exercise specified by the hiring organization, and, at the end, your code is provided to the hiring organization for examination. Inte…

Honestly this sounds terrible. I would never take a proctored test for an interview. Might as well just send the company a copy of your grades from some computer tech class in school, because that is basically what you're proposing. I will happily spend a few hours preparing an open source project and presenting what I've created as part of a final interview. Relying on testing alone is going to get you good test tak…

> I would never take a proctored test for an interview. ... Relying on testing alone is going to get you good test takers.

A conventional interview is basically a set of tests already. A conventional whiteboard coding interview segment is a proctored test, with the interviewer serving double duty as the proctor.

This proposal aims to reduce the stress by having an impartial proctor instead of an interviewer looking over one's shoulder as you code.

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