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My favorite interview process was with Wikimedia. It was a take-home coding project, which I then had to discuss with multiple engineers on the team over the co

by keb_ 7y ago

My favorite interview process was with Wikimedia. It was a take-home coding project, which I then had to discuss with multiple engineers on the team over the course of four interviews (it was a remote position). I didn't get the job, but it was very enjoyable being able to work on something without someone watching me, and then being able to discuss my design decisions with different engineers who had different opinions about how I could improve my work. It was clearly valuable regardless if I got the position. When presented with white-boarding interviews, I'll usually feel physically sick. This includes intense sweating and weirdly enough, gassy-ness. I found this old blogpost pretty relatable: https://aneccodeal.blogspot.com/2014/02/interviewing-for-anxious-programmer.html https://aneccodeal.blogspot.com/2014/02/interviewing-for-anx...

mLuby 7y ago
Agreed. I prefer testing how well a candidate can dive into other peoples' code, understand it, and make changes to meet a spec. To respect their at-home and in-person time, that means sending them a small and straightforward codebase, making them extend it in clearly pass-fail ways, and then when they come in you have them talk about the code and extend it a bit more. The take-home portion serves a few purposes: it filters out uninterested applicants, weeds out non-coders, and lets people prepare in their own time and way (rather than on the spot in an interview). The in-person portion then checks that the candidate can do the work themselves, can communicate about their work, isn't obviously a pain to work with. Most take-homes test the wrong things: whether someone can start a greenfield project, think up interesting new features, or put in more extra hours than their competition. And most in-person interviews test the wrong things too: have you studied interview problems, are you good at coding and problem-solving out loud under time pressure, and how well do you scrawl syntactically correct code on a whiteboard.
- ProZsolt 7y ago
  I have only one thing to add. Don't make it a pre-screen test. I want to know before I do any take-home test that the job is actually a good fit for me.
fapjacks 7y ago
Wow, I envy you! I wish I could express my disappointment by filling a conference room with noxious gas whenever an interviewer puts me in front of a whiteboard. That is seriously like some kind of superpower.

by keb_ 7y ago

mLuby 7y ago

Agreed. I prefer testing how well a candidate can dive into other peoples' code, understand it, and make changes to meet a spec. To respect their at-home and in-person time, that means sending them a small and straightforward codebase, making them extend it in clearly pass-fail ways, and then when they come in you have them talk about the code and extend it a bit more. The take-home portion serves a few purposes: it filters out uninterested applicants, weeds out non-coders, and lets people prepare in their own time and way (rather than on the spot in an interview). The in-person portion then checks that the candidate can do the work themselves, can communicate about their work, isn't obviously a pain to work with. Most take-homes test the wrong things: whether someone can start a greenfield project, think up interesting new features, or put in more extra hours than their competition. And most in-person interviews test the wrong things too: have you studied interview problems, are you good at coding and problem-solving out loud under time pressure, and how well do you scrawl syntactically correct code on a whiteboard.

ProZsolt 7y ago
I have only one thing to add. Don't make it a pre-screen test. I want to know before I do any take-home test that the job is actually a good fit for me.

fapjacks 7y ago

Wow, I envy you! I wish I could express my disappointment by filling a conference room with noxious gas whenever an interviewer puts me in front of a whiteboard. That is seriously like some kind of superpower.