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What's frustrating for me is I tend to choke in high-stress situations like this. I'd rather find this out in an interview than during a critical sprint. That'

by edw519 10y ago

What's frustrating for me is I tend to choke in high-stress situations like this. I'd rather find this out in an interview than during a critical sprint. That's part of the reason I do it this way. I'm interested in your work habits and personality as much as your code. I make my interviews as "low stress" as possible. A coder who can't code for me for 15 to 30 minutes is a big red flag. you're invalidating months/years of open-source work I'm not "invalidating" anything. I'm just doing my job as efficiently as possible, which is to assess your ability to contribute to my team.

Cpoll 10y ago
> I'd rather find this out in an interview than during a critical sprint. I think that's a false equivalence. Crunch isn't like an evaluation. There's already a joke about this, where the interviewer is verbally abusive to the interviewee to "test if they work well under stress." (Not to say that you're doing anything wrong, just that I don't think your gleaning the correct information from such a thing).
joshwcomeau 10y ago
Yeah, as another commenter said, an interview is not the same as a critical sprint. I don't mean that I find coding stressful, I mean that I find the social aspect of being interviewed stressful, and it's hard for me to get in the problem-solving state of mind when in that situation. I don't think you can argue that you're not invalidating someone's experience (within the context of their suitability for the position) if you don't look at any of the code they've written outside an interview process, because it's self-evident that there are candidates that are talented programmers who cannot demonstrate those skills effectively during an interview. You can argue about how insignificant of a minority that is, though. I'm a senior developer who has been offered most of the jobs he's applied for because I _have_ been able to prove basic code literacy during an interview (and have typically surprised employers by how effective I can be, when not in an interview situation). So if the _screening_ bar is low and if you're taking steps to ensure that the handicap of social anxiety is diminished, it may be a negligible percentage of candidates.
wott 10y ago
> I'd rather find this out in an interview than during a critical sprint. There is no relation between those.

by edw519 10y ago

Cpoll 10y ago

> I'd rather find this out in an interview than during a critical sprint. I think that's a false equivalence. Crunch isn't like an evaluation. There's already a joke about this, where the interviewer is verbally abusive to the interviewee to "test if they work well under stress." (Not to say that you're doing anything wrong, just that I don't think your gleaning the correct information from such a thing).

joshwcomeau 10y ago

Yeah, as another commenter said, an interview is not the same as a critical sprint. I don't mean that I find coding stressful, I mean that I find the social aspect of being interviewed stressful, and it's hard for me to get in the problem-solving state of mind when in that situation. I don't think you can argue that you're not invalidating someone's experience (within the context of their suitability for the position) if you don't look at any of the code they've written outside an interview process, because it's self-evident that there are candidates that are talented programmers who cannot demonstrate those skills effectively during an interview. You can argue about how insignificant of a minority that is, though. I'm a senior developer who has been offered most of the jobs he's applied for because I _have_ been able to prove basic code literacy during an interview (and have typically surprised employers by how effective I can be, when not in an interview situation). So if the _screening_ bar is low and if you're taking steps to ensure that the handicap of social anxiety is diminished, it may be a negligible percentage of candidates.

wott 10y ago

> I'd rather find this out in an interview than during a critical sprint. There is no relation between those.