3 ms·

As the replies to this are getting at, it's really important that if you do this you don't require the candidate to use their own laptop. You need to provide a

As the replies to this are getting at, it's really important that if you do this you don't require the candidate to use their own laptop. You need to provide a laptop or like, a mac mini or something you know you can plug in and has baseline requirements for working on the problem you're giving them. And you need to make sure that the problem isn't complex enough that they can't do it in the allotted time if they struggle a bit with an editor they're not used to (including like, vim without their usual barrage of scripts). Otherwise you're just trading one bias for another: winners will be people who have personal laptops set up for coding, which is not a universal trait of good employees who code. Let them use a laptop they bring if they want, but be ready to supply them with something they can use if it doesn't work out.

blisterpeanuts 6y ago
Hm, maybe. I was thinking, work in an environment you're familiar with, since that's a more realistic measure. For example, I'm an Emacs kind of guy, so if they hand me a Windows laptop, do I limp along with Notepad? or some IDE that happens to be installed? Generally, as soon as I've settled in at a new job, I've customized my work environment with something as close to Linux and Emacs as possible -- if Windows, I'll install Cygwin if allowed, and/or Emacs and GNU utilities.
- vonseel 6y ago
  It sounds like definitely an opportunity at the minimum for the existing online interviewing sites to provide a service which installs a candidate's vim configuration (or emacs, not sure how that one works) from a public Github (or other host) git repository URL. They've already gone through the trouble of sandboxing the runtimes somehow so it can't be that difficult to also sandbox the editor. Not sure how it would work for other IDEs but that should at least support vim, maybe others like VS Code and IntelliJ too.
pmontra 6y ago
Give me a Mac and I'll spend half of the time asking you how to do X on a Mac, keyboard, mouse, touchpad, menus and unfamiliar software. Do you really have to test for the ability to use tools instead of the ability of reasoning? A whiteboard doesn't seem bad for that. I would like to understand how the candidates reason, how they interact with colleagues and yes, also how they handle stress. Example from yesterday: I had to fix a problem on a software in production before the end of the day (it must be available today) and before a reasonable hour (I wanted to go out at night.) That means working fast, debug, find solutions, possibly develop workarounds that leave the system working even if the problem is still not fully understood and solved and, most important, don't panic.
- michaelt 6y ago
  > Give me a Mac and I'll spend half of the time asking you how to do X on a Mac I worked at a place that got around this by giving the candidate a choice of their own laptop, a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop, and an Ubuntu laptop. Half a dozen different IDEs on each. Of course, you have to find someone to take on the glamorous job of keeping track of all the laptops, and wiping them between candidates... > Do you really have to test for the ability to use tools instead of the ability of reasoning? A whiteboard doesn't seem bad for that. It depends: If you're a big believer in test-driven development, red-green-refactor, clear naming and good code structure, test coverage, use of version control - you don't tend to see those in whiteboard coding.

blisterpeanuts 6y ago

Hm, maybe. I was thinking, work in an environment you're familiar with, since that's a more realistic measure. For example, I'm an Emacs kind of guy, so if they hand me a Windows laptop, do I limp along with Notepad? or some IDE that happens to be installed? Generally, as soon as I've settled in at a new job, I've customized my work environment with something as close to Linux and Emacs as possible -- if Windows, I'll install Cygwin if allowed, and/or Emacs and GNU utilities.

vonseel 6y ago
It sounds like definitely an opportunity at the minimum for the existing online interviewing sites to provide a service which installs a candidate's vim configuration (or emacs, not sure how that one works) from a public Github (or other host) git repository URL. They've already gone through the trouble of sandboxing the runtimes somehow so it can't be that difficult to also sandbox the editor. Not sure how it would work for other IDEs but that should at least support vim, maybe others like VS Code and IntelliJ too.

pmontra 6y ago

Give me a Mac and I'll spend half of the time asking you how to do X on a Mac, keyboard, mouse, touchpad, menus and unfamiliar software. Do you really have to test for the ability to use tools instead of the ability of reasoning? A whiteboard doesn't seem bad for that. I would like to understand how the candidates reason, how they interact with colleagues and yes, also how they handle stress. Example from yesterday: I had to fix a problem on a software in production before the end of the day (it must be available today) and before a reasonable hour (I wanted to go out at night.) That means working fast, debug, find solutions, possibly develop workarounds that leave the system working even if the problem is still not fully understood and solved and, most important, don't panic.

michaelt 6y ago
> Give me a Mac and I'll spend half of the time asking you how to do X on a Mac I worked at a place that got around this by giving the candidate a choice of their own laptop, a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop, and an Ubuntu laptop. Half a dozen different IDEs on each. Of course, you have to find someone to take on the glamorous job of keeping track of all the laptops, and wiping them between candidates... > Do you really have to test for the ability to use tools instead of the ability of reasoning? A whiteboard doesn't seem bad for that. It depends: If you're a big believer in test-driven development, red-green-refactor, clear naming and good code structure, test coverage, use of version control - you don't tend to see those in whiteboard coding.