Ask HN: Anyone ever consider bringing a coding exercise for the interviewers

Re:Ask HN: Anyone ever consider bringing a coding exercise f... by sebazzz on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @01:08AM (#31984541)

> Often, the person running point on your interviews isn't a programmer in their day-to-day activities. At a tech company they likely have some technical background, but if someone has been a manager for 5 years and isn't coding day-to-day then what do you actually expect to get out of giving them a coding exercise?

We always let a manager and a developer do the interview, and for good reasons because they both have a unique perspective on whether someone fits in the team.

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Re:Ask HN: Anyone ever consider bringing a coding exercise f... by tl_donson on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @05:01PM (#31993636)

I’ve been this developer in a lot of interviews. We don’t typically do in-interview coding questions so it would be a little weird if someone just threw one at me — although I guess it would depend on the context of the question.

My style of interviewing is to have a as casual a conversation as possible with someone about their experience, ask them to do a deep dive into a solution they’ve delivered, what they could have optimised better, what they learned in the process (technical or otherwise), what were the pain points, etc etc.

I find the best applicants get me talking quite a bit about related projects we’ve worked on. It fits the flow of the interview, which is important. Asking me to whiteboard a random algorithm would be bizarrely out of place, but i’ve 100% whiteboarded hypothetical architectures while responding to questions from applicants. If we’re to that step then it’s usually a pretty good sign.

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