

Ask HN: Best way to do a coding exercise for a phone screen? - chollida1

I&#x27;m conducting phone screens for candidates.  Let&#x27;s assume for now two things:<p>1) We want to do a phone screen before onsite interviews and<p>2) we want to have the candidates do a simple coding exercise as part of the phone screen.<p>As part of our phone screen we make all candidates do a simple coding exercise during the interview.  It&#x27;s at the fizbuzz and Steve Yegge phone screen blog post level. ie one of....<p>- Write a function to reverse a string.<p>- Write a function to compute the Nth fibonacci number.<p>- Print out the grade-school multiplication table up to 12 x 12.<p>- Find the largest int value in an int array.<p>We do this as we&#x27;ve had people who we&#x27;ve brought in for onsite interviews that couldn&#x27;t code at all.<p>My question is what should we be using for phone screen coding exercises?<p>Currently I&#x27;m using a shared google doc as the coding platform.  This allows me to see the user code and help him&#x2F;her along the way if they get stuck on something.<p>What else could we be using here?<p>I&#x27;m currently against giving the user &quot;homework&quot; but I&#x27;m willing to be swayed if someone can come up with a convincing reason...<p>Is there a better way to determine basic coding ability during a phone screen?
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karterk
Hi Chris,

Try out Codassium ([http://codassium.com/](http://codassium.com/)), which is
built exactly for this use case. Disclaimer: I helped build it.

Google Docs is just too painful for both the candidate and the interviewer.

You might also want to consider using Interview Street, if all you want to do
is to eliminate people who don't know how to code without spending too much
time on the phone.

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meowface
Personally I don't see the problem with using Google Docs for this, especially
since they're just writing one function that should be pretty simple for any
programmer to write.

It handles tabs decently enough, lets you see what they type live, and is
familiar to most people.

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bendmorris
Unfortunately it defaults to smart quotes so copying and pasting from the doc
into a REPL is impossible.

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bmm6o
Does it have to be just a phone call? Can you do some kind of screen sharing
with Hangouts/Skype/etc?

