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For me, even worse than an in person interview is a remote coding interview over the phone. Usually some sort of screen sharing + phone call. I find it incredi

For me, even worse than an in person interview is a remote coding interview over the phone. Usually some sort of screen sharing + phone call. I find it incredibly nerve wracking because it gives me that feeling of someone standing over my shoulder without me being able to fully interact with them or read their body language. When you sit down to hammer out a solution you have all the additional pressure of trying to stay engaged with someone you can't see. As a result I constantly drop my focus on the problem and lose what I've worked out in my head.

dreamweapon 12y ago
Worse, you simply have no way of knowing what their evaluation criteria are. Maybe they want you to be slow and thorough (I've been nailed for not checking the exit status of print statements). OR maybe they want it quick and dirty, in which case you'll get nailed for "overengineering", or you just wont have time to do it the imaginary time frames they set for these tasks, if you go for any of the defensive practices that the other guy would have nailed you for. Fun, fun, fun.
- rrradical 12y ago
  Very much yes. In an interview I was prompted to write some code that ran as quickly as possible. 10 minutes in they were concerned that I hadn't started with a naive proof-of-concept solution and improved from there. I don't disagree with their idea of good programming practice, but how could I know they wouldn't penalize me for coming up with a slow naive solution, when the prompt specifically said to run as quickly as possible?
- danielweber 12y ago
  1. Tell people what you want. 2. Actually evaluate them on that. Anything else is a psychology test, and you aren't psychologists.
- RogerL 12y ago
  And you have the ever fun "I'm not worried about whether it compiles", followed up with endless "you forgot a semi-colon", "you didn't declare that variable", and so on.
drak0n1c 12y ago
With someone else staring at the screen seeing every letter as I type it there have been cases where I become paralyzed and my mind goes blank on problems that I could have easily solved on my own (without resorting to Stack Overflow, of course). It's a combination of nerves and needing to suppress a part of my natural coding process that occasionally involves a brief frenzy of guess-and-checking and pattern recognition to get my bearings on possible solutions. That part of the process is unconscious and intuitive, kind of like how athletes don't think about what they are doing. If I slow down to consciously relay those early steps of the process it breaks the spell/flow and I go blank. I think the problem is that I have a habit of letting rapid ad-hoc intuition guide my coding, rather than being a rational agent following a pre-planned 'waterfall'. In-the-moment intuition somehow (surprisingly) produces nicely workable and even readable code much of the time, but also entails some amnesia about the steps I took along the way. I occasionally have doubts - am I built to be an engineer? By nature I am a very logical person, why can't I always conceive of a whole answer (or at least a clear direction) before "putting pen to paper"? Working memory deficiency? ADHD? Lack of practice? However, my doubts about programming potential are quelled when my friends and I look at the code I can write and the problems I have solved. Practice makes perfect as they say. I really look forward to using this service.

dreamweapon 12y ago

Worse, you simply have no way of knowing what their evaluation criteria are. Maybe they want you to be slow and thorough (I've been nailed for not checking the exit status of print statements). OR maybe they want it quick and dirty, in which case you'll get nailed for "overengineering", or you just wont have time to do it the imaginary time frames they set for these tasks, if you go for any of the defensive practices that the other guy would have nailed you for. Fun, fun, fun.

rrradical 12y ago
Very much yes. In an interview I was prompted to write some code that ran as quickly as possible. 10 minutes in they were concerned that I hadn't started with a naive proof-of-concept solution and improved from there. I don't disagree with their idea of good programming practice, but how could I know they wouldn't penalize me for coming up with a slow naive solution, when the prompt specifically said to run as quickly as possible?
danielweber 12y ago
1. Tell people what you want. 2. Actually evaluate them on that. Anything else is a psychology test, and you aren't psychologists.
RogerL 12y ago
And you have the ever fun "I'm not worried about whether it compiles", followed up with endless "you forgot a semi-colon", "you didn't declare that variable", and so on.

drak0n1c 12y ago

With someone else staring at the screen seeing every letter as I type it there have been cases where I become paralyzed and my mind goes blank on problems that I could have easily solved on my own (without resorting to Stack Overflow, of course). It's a combination of nerves and needing to suppress a part of my natural coding process that occasionally involves a brief frenzy of guess-and-checking and pattern recognition to get my bearings on possible solutions. That part of the process is unconscious and intuitive, kind of like how athletes don't think about what they are doing. If I slow down to consciously relay those early steps of the process it breaks the spell/flow and I go blank. I think the problem is that I have a habit of letting rapid ad-hoc intuition guide my coding, rather than being a rational agent following a pre-planned 'waterfall'. In-the-moment intuition somehow (surprisingly) produces nicely workable and even readable code much of the time, but also entails some amnesia about the steps I took along the way. I occasionally have doubts - am I built to be an engineer? By nature I am a very logical person, why can't I always conceive of a whole answer (or at least a clear direction) before "putting pen to paper"? Working memory deficiency? ADHD? Lack of practice? However, my doubts about programming potential are quelled when my friends and I look at the code I can write and the problems I have solved. Practice makes perfect as they say. I really look forward to using this service.