It’s not a “take home test”. Half the purpose of live pair coding is to see how the candidate thinks.
It’s a relatively simple project with a skeleton of a class and failing unit tests. They have to fix the code to make the unit tests pass.
If they get through that, I give them a second set of failing unit tests that they have to make pass by fixing the class without breaking the unit tests.
Ah, I also thought you meant a take home test. Do you work for a big company? I’m trying to picture how that interview style would scale. Thanks for sharing.
Well, the first time so saw it Done was for the only large company I ever worked for - what was then a Fortune 10 (non tech company). But on the other hand, the department that I was hired into was actually a recently acquired small company with four developers and the manager was the founder of the original company - so take that as you may.
But, just because a company gets big, doesn’t mean that you can take hiring less seriously. You still have to be sure that you hire the right people. A false positive - hiring someone that can’t do the job - is worse than a false negative - not hiring someone who would be a good fit.
Generally agree except for the last sentence. What if the false negative is Elon Musk? Netscape could have hired him, but they passed. You can always fire a bad hire. You can’t reinterview Musk when you realize your mistake.
