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I am an interviewer for C++ job candidates in the automotive industry.

I do a coding task first and a Q&A afterwards — because these are the requirements.

I did many interviews. My experience is: I could skip the Q&A completely. Most candidates could answer the questions just fine after reading the Wikipedia article for 10 minutes. In the interview I can see if they already read it or not. But I don't think it matters.

What matters are the coding skills. The coding task is quite simple and half of the candidates (with master degrees and 'years of industry experience') fail. But these candidates are often good talkers when they are chatting about the benefits of agile methodology and so on.

I totally agree with you that a candidate should just write any program. I believe I know after 15 minutes if they are developers or not.

But I also agree with the idea that we interviews must calm down the interviewee and remove the nervousness. I don't want to see if they stay cool in an exam situation because daily work is not an exam situation. I want to see if they can code when they are relaxed.




>half of the candidates (with master degrees and 'years of industry experience') fail.

If half the candidates with a master's degree in CS are failing your test, that should be a pretty huge red flag to you that your test might have an issue. What question are they failing?


They don't have problems with the questions. They are not able to write a simple C++. And they are applying for a C++ dev job.


I would think that could get filtered out on the resume check with no relevant experience. Are they lying on the resume?


It's extremely common for people to not only advertise that they have specific skills, but even to have been using those skills for years, yet be entirely unable to demonstrate those skills when requested.

C++ is a particularly badly affected language for some reason. I think there are a lot of people who learned C++ once, a long time ago, then moved to Java as quickly as they could when it came out. But nobody likes to admit that maybe they lost a skill they once had, so they keep putting it down on the CV regardless. And then when asked to write something like hello world, they don't remember how to use std::cout or whatever.


I honestly don't know. I asked myself the same question.

These guys are applying for C++ dev jobs but are completely unable to write a program. Most of these fake programmers have studied electronics (not CS) or have studied in a country where you can buy a degree.




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