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The same way you size up anyone else's aptitude, really: by making them feel comfortable, speaking with them honestly, trying to quickly figure out what excites

The same way you size up anyone else's aptitude, really: by making them feel comfortable, speaking with them honestly, trying to quickly figure out what excites them and asking lots of follow-up questions. When someone is eager and bright, and they've been made to feel relaxed, it's usually obvious. Conducting a great interview is hard. It requires some mentorship and a ton of practice. Not everyone's cut out for it. But when a technical interview is led by an experienced technical person who knows how to interview well, the candidate knows they're being assessed fairly, and you get far more valuable information than you would from these coding challenges.

koonsolo 6y ago
Again an answer with a lot of fluff but no real content. So what do you ask then? How do you assess the skills of the candidate?
- lentil_soup 6y ago
  You ask them about a previous project they've worked on, or a problem you currently have and take it from there. You are bound to hit interesting problems where you can ask them what they would do, if they've had similar issues, how they solved it, what tech they used and why, would you do it differently now, etc. If you care about performance and data structures you can dig in, you can ask what bottlenecks they had, what structures they used. I've had a lot of success just asking in the middle something like "why not use a list or vector?" (in C++), the discussion that follows tells me already if this person knows how memory works, how algorithms scale, etc and this are things I really care about in my industry, not just random trivia. All of this is done as a conversation, I want to minimize their nerves as that just obfuscates the real person I'd be working with. I get none of that info asking someone to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
  "Can you tell me about a hard problem you've solved?" is usually enough to kick off a good dialogue. It gives you a little peek into their approach to solving problems, but also tells you what they think is hard. If you ask good follow up questions, you'll very quickly have a solid understanding of their current experience levels and a rough gauge of their aptitude. A lot of it comes from intuition and experience interviewing and hiring. Building out a great team is more art than science, and you won't ever hone that craft by throwing coding challenges at your applicants - you just end up with a group of people who are a bit more likely to be very good at jumping through arbitrary hoops.

koonsolo 6y ago

Again an answer with a lot of fluff but no real content. So what do you ask then? How do you assess the skills of the candidate?

lentil_soup 6y ago
You ask them about a previous project they've worked on, or a problem you currently have and take it from there. You are bound to hit interesting problems where you can ask them what they would do, if they've had similar issues, how they solved it, what tech they used and why, would you do it differently now, etc. If you care about performance and data structures you can dig in, you can ask what bottlenecks they had, what structures they used. I've had a lot of success just asking in the middle something like "why not use a list or vector?" (in C++), the discussion that follows tells me already if this person knows how memory works, how algorithms scale, etc and this are things I really care about in my industry, not just random trivia. All of this is done as a conversation, I want to minimize their nerves as that just obfuscates the real person I'd be working with. I get none of that info asking someone to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
"Can you tell me about a hard problem you've solved?" is usually enough to kick off a good dialogue. It gives you a little peek into their approach to solving problems, but also tells you what they think is hard. If you ask good follow up questions, you'll very quickly have a solid understanding of their current experience levels and a rough gauge of their aptitude. A lot of it comes from intuition and experience interviewing and hiring. Building out a great team is more art than science, and you won't ever hone that craft by throwing coding challenges at your applicants - you just end up with a group of people who are a bit more likely to be very good at jumping through arbitrary hoops.