

Ask HN: How should we approach remote code interviews? - ghotli

We've nearly exhausted local candidates and are starting to look at remote interviewing. How do other companies approach this? We've got a small programming problem that we have people do if they pass a phone interview, but I sure do miss the ability to put them up on the board and see how they work out a problem.<p>Flying the person in for a final interview is an option, but are there other screen sharing strategies or something like that to see how people approach an on the spot problem?
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shadowz
We were in the same situation recently. We looked for programmers in specific
programming/framework forums (ie. Cake Forum, CodeIgniter Forum since we are
using PHP framework). After receiving a bunch of applications/resumes, we
filtered out to the ones we think are good, then we phoned them and had a
chat. With the Internet, you could use video conferencing programs like
samratjp suggested. In our case, we were lucky since I was on a trip to where
the programmer was so we actually met up before hiring.

Anyhow, good luck with the hiring!

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vtail
Assuming both parties are using Mac OS X, you can try iChat screen sharing.
It's awesome: you have a voice chat + ability for _both_ parties to share and
operate the screen.

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samratjp
You could do an iChat/Skype combination with Google Docs/Etherpad. All you
need to know is in the face, so a webcam can be fine to see how they react and
such.

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wbills
I think the requirement for the interviewee to have a webcam accessible is a
little much.

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samratjp
Well, maybe. But, coming across a webcam these days isn't that hard to be
quite honest. Of course, you could make it optional, but would be an
interesting experiment to see if the interviewee would social engineer to
borrow a webcam if necessary; in a way, if your future employee isn't willing
enough to make the effort to do this simple thing, would you still hire this
person (granted, there will always be introverts in your employee pool, but
presumably you will interact with this employee in person once hired)?

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briandoll
see[Mike]code was written for exactly this problem. I haven't used it for
remote interviews yet, but we tested it out at the office and it seems perfect
for what your describing.

<http://i.seemikecode.com/>

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FreeRadical
With caution.

