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> I've been blown away by a candidate while they're talking about their experience, but then asking them to code something small, they utterly bomb. You're mak
by ryandvm 2y ago
> I've been blown away by a candidate while they're talking about their experience, but then asking them to code something small, they utterly bomb.
You're making the opposite point you think you are. How do you know that you observed an inability to code as opposed to interview performance anxiety?
I've been coding for 25 years, but have bombed my share of very simple white-boarding exercises because I panic and my brain absolutely stops working. If it's experience-based or even take home, I generally knock it out of the park.
White-board coding works for FAANG because they have 100,000 applicants at any given time and it doesn't matter if it has an exceptionally high false negative rate. It does not work so well for shops that are struggling to find candidates.
- VirusNewbie 2y ago>You're making the opposite point you think you are. How do you know that you observed an inability to code as opposed to interview performance anxiety? I've done lots of interviews, and I know that if someone has seen a question recently, or if someone is rusty in interviews, or one of a million things can affect someone's live coding ability. So I'm not looking for speed, I don't give more 'points' to someone who is calm and collected vs. someone who takes twice as long cause they're nervous. They both "pass" in my book. I also don't particularly care if someone starts intermixing java and C++ syntax or forgets the string library and says len(var) instead of var.len() for example. I'm even fine with giving hints. But there are literally people, with hints, who cannot write a basic recursive function or understand to check for null references. That isn't being nervous. That's just...being bad at the craft.