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What on earth is wrong with asking to see the interviewee's code? Skim over it looking for neatness, how they comment, what build procedure is there and quiz th

What on earth is wrong with asking to see the interviewee's code? Skim over it looking for neatness, how they comment, what build procedure is there and quiz them about what you see: anything from language choice, to build reproducibility, from architecture to install. And of course quiz them on algos you see. All of these 'tricky' exam style questions don't show a thing about the person sitting in the interview room. I've hired based on a good discussion alone, without code... And got a great engineer.

dmoy 6y ago
You lose out on candidates who work at companies that don't let them show you their current code, and have a home life that occupies their time outside of work. So, you can ask to see candidate's existing code if you work at a small enough shop and/or don't care about missing out on candidates who don't have shareable code. But if you are trying to hire at a larger scale, it does not work. Many great hiring schemes work until a certain scale and then they fall apart. Some hiring schemes also severely tilt your candidate pool towards a certain subset of the population. I'm sure whiteboard style interviewing also has similar issues.
jefftk 6y ago
In addition to the sibling's excellent "candidates who work at companies that don't let them show you their current code, and have a home life that occupies their time outside of work", here's another category of candidates you lose: people who code differently in their downtime than they do at work. If you looked over my github, you would see most of my commits are ones that, at work, I wouldn't accept from anyone. The code is sloppy, there are no tests, it looks like someone was just trying to get something working as quickly as possible with no thought for maintainability or understandability. But, of course, that's exactly what I was doing! When I code in my spare time, I'm solving problems that I've run into in my spare time, and I approach it very differently from in my work life. The constraints are different, and so the solutions are different.

dmoy 6y ago

You lose out on candidates who work at companies that don't let them show you their current code, and have a home life that occupies their time outside of work. So, you can ask to see candidate's existing code if you work at a small enough shop and/or don't care about missing out on candidates who don't have shareable code. But if you are trying to hire at a larger scale, it does not work. Many great hiring schemes work until a certain scale and then they fall apart. Some hiring schemes also severely tilt your candidate pool towards a certain subset of the population. I'm sure whiteboard style interviewing also has similar issues.

jefftk 6y ago

In addition to the sibling's excellent "candidates who work at companies that don't let them show you their current code, and have a home life that occupies their time outside of work", here's another category of candidates you lose: people who code differently in their downtime than they do at work. If you looked over my github, you would see most of my commits are ones that, at work, I wouldn't accept from anyone. The code is sloppy, there are no tests, it looks like someone was just trying to get something working as quickly as possible with no thought for maintainability or understandability. But, of course, that's exactly what I was doing! When I code in my spare time, I'm solving problems that I've run into in my spare time, and I approach it very differently from in my work life. The constraints are different, and so the solutions are different.