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Yup, there are countless employers looking to hire coders. If your spidey senses tingle, end the interview and move on to the next one. I've got a little anec

Yup, there are countless employers looking to hire coders. If your spidey senses tingle, end the interview and move on to the next one. I've got a little anecdote on an interview that I should have ended, but I was a junior so I didn't really know better at the time. At this interview, one of the things they wanted me to do was to do a series of one minute coding challenges. They weren't leet code or anything, but just difficult enough that they required a lot of knowledge, and I wasn't allowed to look up documentation. This one guy stood behind me and looked over my shoulder with a stop watch. After a minute was up, I had to put down the code I was writing and move on to the next one, and the process would repeat. I think I did about 12 of those. It was some of the most ridiculous bullshit I ever did in an interview. If you didn't remember the exact array method off the top of your head then you were just screwed. Mind you, they were hiring for a junior position. These days there's a possibility I'd survive it, but I wouldn't even bother at this point.

rgreasons 5y ago
I think OP implied a better solution when mentioning interviews that mimic the job: present interviewees with a small take-home case study based on a real on-the-job problem. I have done a few of these and they have been much more enlightening experiences than any paired programming boilerplate live coding exercise. Even in situations in which my proposed solution weren’t up to snuff to land the job, the conversation with the team about my solution felt like an actual representation of what it would be like to be a member of the team.
- friedman23 5y ago
  > present interviewees with a small take-home case study based on a real on-the-job problem In my experience these are terrible. It becomes an arms race, what the company intended to become a 5 hour take home assignment becomes a 20 hour assignment because everyone else that's doing the take home assignment is also spending 20 hours. Take homes are a trap.
  - kodah 5y ago
    Personally, I like the idea of objective based take homes rather than time based. Then just have them check everything in on git so you can see how they work.

rgreasons 5y ago

I think OP implied a better solution when mentioning interviews that mimic the job: present interviewees with a small take-home case study based on a real on-the-job problem. I have done a few of these and they have been much more enlightening experiences than any paired programming boilerplate live coding exercise. Even in situations in which my proposed solution weren’t up to snuff to land the job, the conversation with the team about my solution felt like an actual representation of what it would be like to be a member of the team.

friedman23 5y ago
> present interviewees with a small take-home case study based on a real on-the-job problem In my experience these are terrible. It becomes an arms race, what the company intended to become a 5 hour take home assignment becomes a 20 hour assignment because everyone else that's doing the take home assignment is also spending 20 hours. Take homes are a trap.
- kodah 5y ago
  Personally, I like the idea of objective based take homes rather than time based. Then just have them check everything in on git so you can see how they work.