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At one place there was a bug squash interview like this. Rough idea was we wrote a very small version of a system we had in our app (some data-syncing-then-disp

by rtpg 2y ago

At one place there was a bug squash interview like this. Rough idea was we wrote a very small version of a system we had in our app (some data-syncing-then-displaying service), with a handful of bugs and a very simple feature request. It was very helpful for sanity checking if a person was able to be in front of a computer. There's a bit of a challenge because I think there's a pretty low ceiling of performance (strace on a Python program is fun, but our bugs are not that deep!), but we could use it to also talk about new features on this mini-system and whatnot. General feeling on it was "this is a great filter", because ultimately we needed people to just pass above a minimum skill bar, not be maximally good at coding. And having the exercise really helped to communicate the day-to-day (which can be tedious!)

bluGill 2y ago
I've interviewed a few people who have a great resume and came off well in the interview, but I was left wondering if they could write code. (HR only allows me to ask specific research based questions in an interview and so it is easy to answer well without giving any indication you can write code). We now have some filter exercises that are about if you can write code at all.
Izkata 2y ago
> (strace on a Python program is fun, but our bugs are not that deep!) They don't need to be deep to be useful. I once used it on nodejs on a hunch, looking for anything that felt "off", and discovered it was accessing settings files I had no idea even existed. Turned out the other dev was having problems because of one in his home directory the rest of us didn't have.
tharibo 2y ago
This. Keep in mind people that a job interview is to check wether you want to work with the person, not to judge if they "pass" the test. Or to say it differently, they don't have to find and fix the bug, they have to demonstrate ability with the tools, a good attitude, a match with your work culture.

by rtpg 2y ago

bluGill 2y ago

I've interviewed a few people who have a great resume and came off well in the interview, but I was left wondering if they could write code. (HR only allows me to ask specific research based questions in an interview and so it is easy to answer well without giving any indication you can write code). We now have some filter exercises that are about if you can write code at all.

Izkata 2y ago

> (strace on a Python program is fun, but our bugs are not that deep!) They don't need to be deep to be useful. I once used it on nodejs on a hunch, looking for anything that felt "off", and discovered it was accessing settings files I had no idea even existed. Turned out the other dev was having problems because of one in his home directory the rest of us didn't have.

tharibo 2y ago

This. Keep in mind people that a job interview is to check wether you want to work with the person, not to judge if they "pass" the test. Or to say it differently, they don't have to find and fix the bug, they have to demonstrate ability with the tools, a good attitude, a match with your work culture.