4 ms·

I understand and truly symphatize with stress the candidate is in, but someone who claims to be a "senior developer with 10 years experience" should be able to

I understand and truly symphatize with stress the candidate is in, but someone who claims to be a "senior developer with 10 years experience" should be able to write that palindrome function in 30 whole minutes in any kind of stress scenario. Because if I hire that person, they'll be in charge of critical production systems and will face much harder problems in much more stressful situations and if they can't handle the palindrome question, I have very little confidence they can handle the actual job.

ryandrake 9y ago
People are strange. I can totally picture someone who is an experienced senior, a hero under the pressure of a critical production outage, yet whose brain goes into a crash loop when sitting across from someone who has the power to deny them their dream job. Not claiming to be that hero, but I have personally had those moments where I came out of the interview, and as the disorienting fog of pressure lifted during my drive home I said to myself, "WTF happened to my brain in there? I know that stuff cold!" EDIT: I think I read this one from a commenter here, but it's so true: We're interviewing people to be music composers, but judging them by their ability to be performance artists.
- calcifer 9y ago
  Fair enough. I certainly don't claim to know the best interview method ever; simply that, in my experience, starting with trivial coding questions has a higher benefit/risk ratio then other approaches.
monksy 9y ago
I don't agree. They should be able to write that as a solution to resolve an issue. It should be very well understood why they're writing it. Additionally, if you want to keep going under that justification: you should also accept quick alternatives that aren't the naive approach. (i.e. bring out groovy, using bash, etc)
- vorg 9y ago
  Even a "systems" language like Go is just as suitable for a "quick alternative" as a "scripty" language like Apache Groovy or Bash.

ryandrake 9y ago

People are strange. I can totally picture someone who is an experienced senior, a hero under the pressure of a critical production outage, yet whose brain goes into a crash loop when sitting across from someone who has the power to deny them their dream job. Not claiming to be that hero, but I have personally had those moments where I came out of the interview, and as the disorienting fog of pressure lifted during my drive home I said to myself, "WTF happened to my brain in there? I know that stuff cold!" EDIT: I think I read this one from a commenter here, but it's so true: We're interviewing people to be music composers, but judging them by their ability to be performance artists.

calcifer 9y ago
Fair enough. I certainly don't claim to know the best interview method ever; simply that, in my experience, starting with trivial coding questions has a higher benefit/risk ratio then other approaches.

monksy 9y ago

I don't agree. They should be able to write that as a solution to resolve an issue. It should be very well understood why they're writing it. Additionally, if you want to keep going under that justification: you should also accept quick alternatives that aren't the naive approach. (i.e. bring out groovy, using bash, etc)

vorg 9y ago
Even a "systems" language like Go is just as suitable for a "quick alternative" as a "scripty" language like Apache Groovy or Bash.