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Maybe combine the two - Have the applicant do a small task then talk about it. Maybe give them a slightly dubious direction then see if they followed to the let

Maybe combine the two - Have the applicant do a small task then talk about it. Maybe give them a slightly dubious direction then see if they followed to the letter or deviated and their reasoning for it. I am having an interview next week and I hope it will be going like that. They emailed me yesterday with a small coding task. I was supposed to setup a simple server updated website with blazor (horrible name) using (a) Background Worker for the Server side "computation" that updates the page with a random number every X seconds. Even not having worked with asp.net directly ever it was fairly easy to setup and implement. The complexities are rather well hidden by dotnet. But the use of the BackgroundWorker class seemed weird to me. In fact I implemented it first with a simple timer instead before noticing the ambiguity in the task description. So I implemented it both ways. I think I spend less than an hour on it and thats nice cause it respects my time :)

danielvaughn 3y ago
My favorite style of interview was actually a take-home exercise. Back in 2016 I interviewed with Blue Apron and they asked me to create a custom javascript framework from scratch to render a recipe app or something like that. Then I had an interview where I discussed my solution and we reviewed the code together. It was a time sink for sure, but I can't stand coding in front of people because I usually like to sit and reflect. And I had a good amount of time to prepare my thoughts on what I'd built. No hidden surprises, no anxiety. I loved it.
michael_mroczka 3y ago
Your thought is a good one, and I think it is a valid approach. The barrier that comes up when doing this is still going to be cheating. How do you separate the people who are cheating on these at-home tests? Salesforce had a good interview practice a few years back where they invited you to a meeting. Started a recording, then asked you to keep your microphone and camera on and do several simple programming tasks. It was an "open book," and you could use whatever you wanted, but you just had to show how you got to where you were (and you could only use one monitor so that it was clear what you were looking at at all times). The engineer who met you on the call left after just a couple of minutes, and you could work in peace without having to worry about "entertaining them."

danielvaughn 3y ago

My favorite style of interview was actually a take-home exercise. Back in 2016 I interviewed with Blue Apron and they asked me to create a custom javascript framework from scratch to render a recipe app or something like that. Then I had an interview where I discussed my solution and we reviewed the code together. It was a time sink for sure, but I can't stand coding in front of people because I usually like to sit and reflect. And I had a good amount of time to prepare my thoughts on what I'd built. No hidden surprises, no anxiety. I loved it.

michael_mroczka 3y ago

Your thought is a good one, and I think it is a valid approach. The barrier that comes up when doing this is still going to be cheating. How do you separate the people who are cheating on these at-home tests? Salesforce had a good interview practice a few years back where they invited you to a meeting. Started a recording, then asked you to keep your microphone and camera on and do several simple programming tasks. It was an "open book," and you could use whatever you wanted, but you just had to show how you got to where you were (and you could only use one monitor so that it was clear what you were looking at at all times). The engineer who met you on the call left after just a couple of minutes, and you could work in peace without having to worry about "entertaining them."