It causes a surprising number of problems. A lot of candidates come in with their environments just very poorly configured, run into weird dependency errors, mismatched installed versions, no linting or syntax highlighting set up in their editor because they don't actually ever code on their personal computer, etc. It's not uncommon to spend half the interview watching someone debug their dev environment, or struggle to remember the basic syntax of their favorite framework since they aren't working on the same codebase that they're used to.
I've mostly come around again at this point and decided that even if I like this type of interview best in theory, focusing on standalone problems that can be done in coderpad with no dependencies is a more reliable approach.
Now THAT reflects the actual daily experience of working programmers.
All the maddening little configuration options to get things working correctly, and seem to take up far more time than actually writing code to solve customers problems.
Isn't that a useful way to filter out candidates that you don't want to hire? Presumably they know in advance what kind of code you're going to ask them to write, so they have time to set things up beforehand.
The reality is that for the past few years at least in SF, hiring engineers has just gotten more and more competitive. Most people who pass our interview will have multiple other offers, often some from companies with a bigger name brand than our own. At least in my opinion, most companies in this environment can't afford to have such strict purity tests. It's supply and demand.
This balance may be changing now given the current recession, it seems even in tech things have cooled off a bit the past few months.
Its actually bad practice in a lot of peoples opinion you should develop and test on an identical system hw/sw to the system you will deploy on.
You need to provide a laptop or like, a mac mini or something you know you can plug in and has baseline requirements for working on the problem you're giving them. And you need to make sure that the problem isn't complex enough that they can't do it in the allotted time if they struggle a bit with an editor they're not used to (including like, vim without their usual barrage of scripts).
Otherwise you're just trading one bias for another: winners will be people who have personal laptops set up for coding, which is not a universal trait of good employees who code.
Let them use a laptop they bring if they want, but be ready to supply them with something they can use if it doesn't work out.
Do you really have to test for the ability to use tools instead of the ability of reasoning? A whiteboard doesn't seem bad for that. I would like to understand how the candidates reason, how they interact with colleagues and yes, also how they handle stress.
Example from yesterday: I had to fix a problem on a software in production before the end of the day (it must be available today) and before a reasonable hour (I wanted to go out at night.) That means working fast, debug, find solutions, possibly develop workarounds that leave the system working even if the problem is still not fully understood and solved and, most important, don't panic.
I worked at a place that got around this by giving the candidate a choice of their own laptop, a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop, and an Ubuntu laptop. Half a dozen different IDEs on each.
Of course, you have to find someone to take on the glamorous job of keeping track of all the laptops, and wiping them between candidates...
> Do you really have to test for the ability to use tools instead of the ability of reasoning? A whiteboard doesn't seem bad for that.
It depends: If you're a big believer in test-driven development, red-green-refactor, clear naming and good code structure, test coverage, use of version control - you don't tend to see those in whiteboard coding.
For example, I'm an Emacs kind of guy, so if they hand me a Windows laptop, do I limp along with Notepad? or some IDE that happens to be installed? Generally, as soon as I've settled in at a new job, I've customized my work environment with something as close to Linux and Emacs as possible -- if Windows, I'll install Cygwin if allowed, and/or Emacs and GNU utilities.
I'm not sure I would even look like a proficient computer users on my personal laptop. It runs Windows, and at this point my macos work environment is so heavily customized that I'd be bound to get tripped up just by the sudden unexpected need to use a mouse.
It can be easily solved by asking what is a parts of code do, or how it works and why.
I'm somewhat like you; I do a wide variety of tasks every day and simply can't keep all the different rules and syntaxes in my head. I'm terrible at tests anyway and would probably bomb a FAANG interview badly because of my lousy memory.
As an interviewer, I would rather someone be generally smart, have a good work ethic and lots of experience solving problems. In the long run that seems more useful than being able to write computer programs on a piece of paper in a conference room.