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Just to clarify, I thought the author of the linked piece was suggesting that people could share actual code from previous employers somehow. Of course it's rea
by autarch 6y ago
Just to clarify, I thought the author of the linked piece was suggesting that people could share actual code from previous employers somehow. Of course it's reasonable to ask people about their past work in an interview and to expect them to speak about it coherently.
- lhorie 6y agoI think OP did suggest sharing actual work, which would make sense if said work consists of e.g. semantic html that can be looked at in a publicly accessible site. Obviously sharing backend trade secrets would be a big no-no. I've had people say they can't talk about their work due to NDAs, and that's completely fine in my books. We just move on to another topic. FWIW, even when a candidate mentions having an OSS project, I refrain from looking at the actual code, and especially doing code review. I don't consider an interview setting the appropriate place to be grilling people on why they used a while loop instead of a for loop or whatever, since a) nearly everyone writes "bad" code occasionally and b) often things are done in certain ways for some good reason that isn't really relevant to my goal of evaluating the candidate. At the end of the day, the interviewer's goal IMHO should be to get as many signals they can from the conversation and make a determination about whether the candidate meets/exceeds a minimum threshold of competence