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We had some fairly standard interview questions that I wrote - problem solving type questions asking someone to sketch out a pseudocode answer. One of the smart

We had some fairly standard interview questions that I wrote - problem solving type questions asking someone to sketch out a pseudocode answer. One of the smarter things I did was 'interview' several of our existing employees to get an idea of where people would fall on the scale. It was a great help when we then started giving them to candidates, and prevented us hiring some people because no, the good people we had really could solve these problems with only a bit of nudging.

macksd 4y ago
This is more or less what we do on my current team. We write out a doc explaining all the common solutions, and what a good candidate should consider and be able to answer, and have a rubric, and we ensure people don't judge candidates until they've shadowed enough that we should have a pretty consistent scale and have made a reasonable effort at being objective. The downside is some people have barely scraped by in the interview and turned out to be absolute rockstars and day 1, and some people have aced the process and driven everyone else mad with incompetence. So it could be improved. And maybe that's just on us not writing the perfect questions yet, but a bigger problem is that once we've used a question enough someone will post it online and suddenly a suspicious number of candidates are able to show up and rattle off all 3 optimal solutions in 15 minutes. Weird! I suspect a standardized test approach to software engineers would get this problem even worse.