It was a gigantic waste of time. Some whiteboarding would have been adequate; it would have been better, even, without all the weird keystroke errors and unwritten expectations on the codebase.
While I have great appreciation for problem solving and human interaction, pairing on a non-customized computer, on a random code base, with someone you met 5 minutes ago is absolutely the wrong way to go about interviewing.
I've done work sample tests: they take a lot of time (time is money), and I don't really have enough invested in this company to want to work for free. I'd much rather do a work-sample after the onsite - let's at least determine if we are comfortable around each other before I start investing hours of my after work life into this thing.
> I'd much rather do a work-sample after the onsite
Pivotal Labs and Pivotal Cloud Foundry teams default to 100% pairing.
What you experienced is basically the actual job. It's perfectly OK that you didn't like it, lots of people don't want to work that way once they've tried it.
But it wouldn't make sense to find potential pair programmers by not pair programming.
It was a gigantic waste of time. Some whiteboarding would have been adequate; it would have been better, even, without all the weird keystroke errors and unwritten expectations on the codebase.
While I have great appreciation for problem solving and human interaction, pairing on a non-customized computer, on a random code base, with someone you met 5 minutes ago is absolutely the wrong way to go about interviewing.
I've done work sample tests: they take a lot of time (time is money), and I don't really have enough invested in this company to want to work for free. I'd much rather do a work-sample after the onsite - let's at least determine if we are comfortable around each other before I start investing hours of my after work life into this thing.