
Why I Don't Do Live Coding Interviews - lj3
https://www.zamiang.com/posts/post/2016/04/08/why-i-dont-do-live-coding-interviews/
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davismwfl
I am also not a fan of the "hey code this while I watch you" process. There is
no reality to this process, I have written code that many of the people
"testing" me would not have ever considered, does that make me some super
programmer? NO, it makes me a guy that had no other choice so I learned it and
did it. Asking me to write your next brainfuck interpreter or whatever
algorithm you want may or may not result in positive results, but either way
you will learn very little of what I am capable of in your pre determined time
period.

If you want to know what I can offer after 25+ years in this industry, look at
what I have done, talk to me for 15 minutes without the entitled attitude that
tells me you are a new grad and have no real world experience. That fact is, I
don't care if you are a new grad, but I admit I do get excited when I meet new
grads because that means I can likely learn things from you, at least as much
as you can learn from me. But in the end, don't BS me, I've written production
level code for years and (overall) know the reality versus your fiction you
are telling yourself.

In the end, I don't mind hard questions or questions that are related to the
issue you will have me solve. But to ask me to write an array reversal in
Javascript and I do so at a low level and you ding me cause I didn't use some
new fangled framework is just an indictment of your own education not my
experience.

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blackflame7000
Coding Interviews are like testing a Marathon runner by how fast they can run
the 100 meter dash. Sure people who struggle in the 100 meters will also
probably struggle in a marathon, but the best marathon runners aren't always
the fastest sprinters.

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throwaway2016a
From the subheading: "Live coding interviews test culture fit under the guise
of testing competence."

When I'm interviewing it's not a guise. I am very clearly interviewing you
for:

\- cultural fit

\- how you approach the problem

\- and how well you communicate

For us the actual code we ask to write is very simple. Think fizz buzz. I
would never dream to ask to, for example, write code to balance a binary tree.
I think those questions are crazy. 90% of our team couldn't do that on a white
board and that's completely OK because it's not a skill you need day-to-day.
If I based decisions on those kind of algorithms I wouldn't have hired most of
our team and it would have been our loss not theirs.

With that said, some people couldn't complete our basic challenge so even
though it's not intended as a code competency hurdle, it effectively has
weeded out some people who clearly would not be able to function in their
daily job.

I'm not sure how I'd react if someone outright refused to do it. I guess I'll
deal with that if it happens.

~~~
nikki-9696
"it effectively has weeded out some people who clearly would not be able to
function in their daily job"

Did it, or did it weed out people who got so nervous at being asked to perform
for an audience on demand that they froze up? I have social anxiety, and while
I've been super lucky to get jobs through referrals of other colleagues (who
introduced me ahead of time to folks I would be interviewing with), if I had
to do this in front of a bunch of strangers judging me, I'd probably appear to
be very bad at my job. How I act normally with people whom I know is very
different than how I act around people whom I feel are just there to judge me
and decide how worthy I am.

~~~
throwaway2016a
You raise a valid concern I don't have a good answer for you.

I've interviewed people with some pretty severe anxiety who have passed it and
some who accepted offers. But that is not to say there wasn't someone weeded
out that shouldn't have been.

Although for the people who failed the coding part of it I'd say they
definitely behaved more overly confident than anxious.

Edit: with that said I have some experience successfully teaching programming
to people with disabilities (in a university setting) which probably makes me
a fair amount more qualified than many other higher managers. But again, there
are no guarantees.

