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When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

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Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#41

Post by BFLpL0QNek »

I like this approach.

Far to often I’ve interviewed at places and been grilled by the interviewer only to find out when you start the quality isn’t great, what you where grilled on you won’t be working on “as that’s to hard” or “we don’t do that” despite being grilled on it and the level of skill not to great they just want senior people. It’s the bait and switch.

At least being taken through existing code you know what you are getting yourself in to. Also looking at the current open pull requests and closed pull requests to see the standard and speed of delivery. Bonus points for no PR’s and trunk driven development as that shows a very mature team.

My simpler interviews have often been with companies that have held a higher bar than the ones with tougher interviews. Those companies have often been sink or swim though and if you don’t make the grade you’ll be kicked out pretty quick. My last company had a reputation for new starts disappearing and not great that way, but the team was probably the strongest bunch of people I’ve ever worked with as only do good survived.

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#42

Post by 8note »

HorizonXP wrote: post #19
gaoshan wrote: post #14

This is exactly what I started doing at my company a few years back. You are presented with a complete app written in the stack we use. This app has some bugs we will solve to get it working (nothing that's a trick... actual, commonly encountered bugs that have all the error messaging you need to solve them). Once it is working you will walk me through a particular flow of the app, explaining what is going on and why…

Are you able or willing to share some samples? I've been shying away from doing technical assessments the "old way," instead focusing on having a discussion about a candidates past projects. I feel like your way could be a good chance to get insights into someone's problem solving and critical thinking skills, which is truly what we value as a dev team.

I've had one given as a thought experiement.

List as many different ways as you can for how to figure out if a singly list is broken and has a loop

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#43

Post by quantisan »

johnqian wrote: post #18

I sometimes ask candidates "what kind of interview do you feel would best bring out your strengths?" and try to adapt the interview to their response if I can. It's helpful if they want to talk about side projects or war stories, but doesn't pressure them to. I still give my coding challenge after. Wonder why no one else does this.

how do you ensure consistent criteria between candidates and avoid unconscious bias?

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#44

Post by yitr »

0x20cowboy wrote: post #31

I think we should just jump to the end game and make interviewees do ultra man triathlons while solving differential equations. Then at the finish line, they knife fight each other to find the one we let go to the next stage in the interview. That way we can be sure who has stamina and the best competitive programming problem solving skills. Something like squid game will truely find the A players. I mean, we wouldn’…

> post: have candidates read code

and this is your response? did you come up with extremely clever reduction in the shower and wait for the first post that's tangentially relevant (and in fact embodies the opposite of what you're attacking?)

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#45

Post by swayvil »

jpgvm wrote: post #33
swayvil wrote: post #2

You could ask them to show you their favorite personal projects. Have a conversation about that. Seems most natural and revealing.

Or any opensource project they have contributed to.

Yes, that would do nicely.

Doing it because you choose to. Because you like it. That's key.

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#46

Post by WaxProlix »

andrewflnr wrote: post #37

My thesis is that the true measure of reading code is still the ability to fix and extend it. So my current ideal interview problem is still a tiny toy codebase, where the interviewee is tasked with adding some (relatively trivial) feature to it. Like ten lines of code, but where those lines require you to have grokked the other couple hundred or so. Any downsides?

Only one I can think of is that a couple hundred lines (depending on content of course) can be quite a bit to grok within a 50 minute span. Especially if there are a number of places where improvements might make sense, but you have one or two in mind specifically...

I've been in that sort of position tbh, where a 200 line codebase has maybe 20-30 obviously wrong parts (creds in code, calls to 3rd party service in code w/o cacheing, maybe that could just be a service? why is this not in a queue, ...) and it's sort of weird that getting 11/14 and talking over pros and cons of the others can be considered a barely-pass.

Still, you're not wrong. Find a good enough, real-life enough example and it'd make for a great question.

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#47

Post by paulgb »

andrewflnr wrote: post #37

My thesis is that the true measure of reading code is still the ability to fix and extend it. So my current ideal interview problem is still a tiny toy codebase, where the interviewee is tasked with adding some (relatively trivial) feature to it. Like ten lines of code, but where those lines require you to have grokked the other couple hundred or so. Any downsides?

One thing I like about this (as opposed to a “blank slate” coding challenge) is that it shows how well the candidate is able to fit into the broader design style of the surrounding code. Not just the superficial things (like naming conventions), but also the structural patterns.

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#48

Post by ddaalluu2 »

johnqian wrote: post #18

I sometimes ask candidates "what kind of interview do you feel would best bring out your strengths?" and try to adapt the interview to their response if I can. It's helpful if they want to talk about side projects or war stories, but doesn't pressure them to. I still give my coding challenge after. Wonder why no one else does this.

No post body was provided.

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#49

Post by wsostt »

I've been doing this for a long time now. I present the candidate with a function (on paper) that compiles and runs. It does the job but it does everything poorly: an embedded connection string, leaves the connection open, no error handling, bad variable names, no comments, etc... EVERY candidate can find something wrong with this code and the things they pick up is informative. Juniors can find the easy stuff, more senior-level folks find the deeper flaws about the basic structure of the code like figuring that a lot of this is boilerplate that could be implemented elsewhere.

Re: When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code

#50

Post by mhh__ »

andrewflnr wrote: post #38
0x20cowboy wrote: post #31

I think we should just jump to the end game and make interviewees do ultra man triathlons while solving differential equations. Then at the finish line, they knife fight each other to find the one we let go to the next stage in the interview. That way we can be sure who has stamina and the best competitive programming problem solving skills. Something like squid game will truely find the A players. I mean, we wouldn’…

Right, if you're a big company you can more easily afford to have false negatives than false positives, so why not add knife fighting to the list of qualifications, just in case?

arguably worse for smaller companies. if you hire the wrong person you can't even try and move them somewhere better suited to them
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