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The thing I see people getting wrong with live coding interviews (speaking as an interviewer) is that their code rarely matters. If you write some code, I might
by bastawhiz 2y ago
The thing I see people getting wrong with live coding interviews (speaking as an interviewer) is that their code rarely matters. If you write some code, I might ask "So what kinds of failure modes will this code need to account for?" Whether you named your variables well or wrote comments didn't matter. If you can't talk about your work or explain your thinking or discuss tradeoffs or question constraints or show your thought process, that's what's going to fail the interview for you. Getting the exact right solution is bonus points, but the job isn't to consistently get things 100% right writing code by hand.
- hnfong 2y agoWhat you said is true, but it's much easier to do if you (as the interviewer) have full control over the questions and evaluation of the candidate in your interview. For larger orgs at scale, often the interviewer needs to stick to a script, ostensibly to avoid personal bias (which probably does happen to a degree), and to make scores between interviewers comparable. In such cases it might be difficult for the interviewer to argue that the candidate has done well despite "not getting the answer correct". A lot of the grievances people have for the interview process are artifacts of scaling the interview process for the largest tech companies. As for the smaller ones, it's basically good ol' cargo-culting. Small startups that follow FAANG processes probably don't realize they can customize their hiring process to their advantage.