3 ms·

For what it's worth, I hate and am doing everything I can to kill the coding interview as typically practiced. Giving a take-home exercise and having part of t

For what it's worth, I hate and am doing everything I can to kill the coding interview as typically practiced. Giving a take-home exercise and having part of the interview be a collaborative review of it? Good idea, works well. Developing exercises where interviewer and candidate pair on a problem, using real coding tools and looking things up as necessary? Good idea, works well. "Here's the whiteboard, here's a problem, code it up" -- doesn't usefully distinguish qualified from unqualified candidates, doesn't give you meaningful information about job-relevant skills, serves only to make people squirm and serve as a "yeah, but I had to do it to pass the interview, too, so now you do". Get rid of it forever. Also, any set of questions designed not to determine someone's programming ability but instead to act as a proxy for something else, like "went to Stanford", goes out the window first chance I get.

hvidgaard 10y ago
If you cannot write a basic loop and if statement of maybe 10-20 lines on a whiteboard, you're going to have a hard time in a team of developers trying to collaborate in problem solving. This is not implementing van Emde Boa search structure, but simple stuff any entry level programmer must comprehend for a general programming posistion.
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  If you want a coding exercise you can have one. If you think the only way to have a coding exercise is to pose a whiteboard problem, then my advice is get out of this industry, now.
  - hvidgaard 10y ago
    I give my candidates a choice of a whiteboard or a laptop and projector. Most people choose the whiteboard. Some outright say that they need to look at it at home. The latter will not be able to participate in a meaningful way in a team, and as much as I want to, I don't have work for a loner. But my point is that, as a team you need to be able to express ideas in a format that other developers can reason with you in a live setting. Nothing beats a whiteboard in that regard. You can use a projector and a computer, but what if you need to draw a graph or something else? It's not a tall order to ask them to be able to do this. And please don't forget that I'm not asking people to implement RB search trees, but usually a simple loop and an if statement. Reverse a list using a for loop, transform this string into a palindrome, is this string a palindrone, remove all duplicates in a list - stuff like that.
  - random314 10y ago
    > If you think the only way to have a coding exercise is to pose a whiteboard problem, then my advice is get out of this industry, now. Asking coders with 10 years of experience to write 10 lines of pseudoish code is wrong!! Try avoiding a coding exercise in interviews for coding positions at all costs. In the worst case make it a take home exercise. This is the only way to save this industry!!! Got it!

hvidgaard 10y ago

If you cannot write a basic loop and if statement of maybe 10-20 lines on a whiteboard, you're going to have a hard time in a team of developers trying to collaborate in problem solving. This is not implementing van Emde Boa search structure, but simple stuff any entry level programmer must comprehend for a general programming posistion.

ubernostrum 10y ago
If you want a coding exercise you can have one. If you think the only way to have a coding exercise is to pose a whiteboard problem, then my advice is get out of this industry, now.
- hvidgaard 10y ago
  I give my candidates a choice of a whiteboard or a laptop and projector. Most people choose the whiteboard. Some outright say that they need to look at it at home. The latter will not be able to participate in a meaningful way in a team, and as much as I want to, I don't have work for a loner. But my point is that, as a team you need to be able to express ideas in a format that other developers can reason with you in a live setting. Nothing beats a whiteboard in that regard. You can use a projector and a computer, but what if you need to draw a graph or something else? It's not a tall order to ask them to be able to do this. And please don't forget that I'm not asking people to implement RB search trees, but usually a simple loop and an if statement. Reverse a list using a for loop, transform this string into a palindrome, is this string a palindrone, remove all duplicates in a list - stuff like that.
- random314 10y ago
  > If you think the only way to have a coding exercise is to pose a whiteboard problem, then my advice is get out of this industry, now. Asking coders with 10 years of experience to write 10 lines of pseudoish code is wrong!! Try avoiding a coding exercise in interviews for coding positions at all costs. In the worst case make it a take home exercise. This is the only way to save this industry!!! Got it!