Re:The Product Engineer
by DavidChouinard on Monday January 04, 2016 @02:24PM
(#10837835)
In general, anything that moves the interview from adversarial to collaborative is a big win. In many ways, interviewing is a lot less about assessing skill and a lot more about creating affection between two strangers.
That fits -- it's difficult enough to recruit people, let alone people that you can work with, or building out a gelled team that can work through on a lot of challenging things (and not all those challenges are technical).
I had one of these "pair" things by a startup touting how different their process was. It consisted of two developers doing work while I solved a thinly-veiled CS101 interview question alone, on a setup I wasn't familiar with, in an editor I couldn't change. I tried to ask questions but the typical answer is "we really cant help you". I'll take the whiteboard, thanks.
Re:The Product Engineer
by ricardolopes on Monday January 04, 2016 @02:10PM
(#10837731)
Completely agree with pairing. If possible, with more than one developer, to avoid possible biases.
In addition to those reasons, I also like pairing because it also reveals what kind of team player you are, and going to be if you're hired (are you just redirecting blame, are you taking any initiative, what kind of questions do you ask...). Which is one of the most underrated skills when hiring, IMO.
Put another way: I've probably done a dozen or two product interviews this year, and have still never seen a full stack web request. I mean, I haven't seen a controller action, or a view, or even a model for that matter. And that's the area that's my entire job, really: I build screens and hook things together and make things work for users. As much as feasible, I'd like to be able to demonstrate those types of talents in the interview process.