I thought I was going to be completely infuriated by this as I've seen just far too many articles about hiring recently. However, it's worth a read because it

I thought I was going to be completely infuriated by this as I've seen just far too many articles about hiring recently. However, it's worth a read because it does a good job of summarising the trade-offs inherent in most of the techniques I've seen used to hire engineers. I might have missed it, but it didn't talk about any kind of software design assessment, which I have used and seen used reasonably successfully. There was, however, one observation that ticked me off under cons in the "Live Coding Exercises" section: > Very stressful. Many programmers can’t handle the stress of coding under the clock, with someone watching them If this is you I'm going to give you some advice that, if you can swallow it, will prove very helpful... Grow up. Seriously: grow up. You are (or will be) highly paid, and are supposedly a professional. So learn to toughen up and handle the pressure. Because I guarantee you this: you will grow in any job that is worth having. Sometimes that growth will be forced. Even when it's not, it can still be uncomfortable and stressful. Why? Because you're doing things you haven't had the chance to become comfortable with, or there's some external pressure: deadlines loom; a teammate is off sick; a horrific security flaw is discovered in your code, or in a library you use; some terrible bug makes it into production (this happens at even the best companies) and you need to hustle to fix it; politics happens, and you have to navigate through it. In this line of work you cannot avoid stress. You can certainly make every effort to run an orderly software development process with great teams, regular releases, great feedback mechanisms, interesting work, and all the rest, to minimise chaos, but that doesn't get rid of the stress. We're software developers. Our stock in trade is dealing with really hard problems. Sometimes those problems are technical, sometimes organisational, sometimes commercial, more often a blend of all three (along with other factors). Guess what? Dealing with hard problems is stressful. Easy problems aren't stressful (although boredom is for many), but if you wanted easy you chose the wrong profession. So buckle up. Because if you cannot handle an hour sitting down and working either with an interviewer or under their observation/guidance on a problem, how are you going to handle it on the job when it all kicks off (whatever "it all" happens to be on the occasion in question)?[1] [1] This presupposes the interviewer isn't an asshole, and can be depended upon to behave like a grown-up. I have borne direct witness to, or heard report of, far too many interviews where the interviewer appears to be on a mission to prove they're smarter than the candidate. If you are unlucky enough to be interviewed by somebody who behaves like this you may be better off looking for a position elsewhere even if you're offered the job.