this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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Programming
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I asked candidates to bring me some code they were proud of and teach me how it worked. Weeded out people really quickly and brought quality candidates to the top. On two separate occasions we hired devs with zero experience in the language or framework and they rocked it. Trythat with your coding interview, eh? ๐
That sounds like a good plan in many situations... But how do you handle candidates who say something like "look, there's heaps of code that I'm proud of and would love to walk you through, but it's all work I've done for past companies and don't have access (or the legal right) to show you?"
You might just say "well the ideal candidate has meaningful projects outside of work," and just eliminate the others... But it seems like you'd lose out on many otherwise great candidates that way.
It never once happened. They always knew in advance, so they could code something up if they felt like it.
Interesting, thanks. Do you give them any ideas or guidance as to what they should whip up? Or just leave it totally open-ended for them to figure out?
I always left it open-ended and that seemed to work. Part of the interview was seeing what they'd come up with. I'm pretty sure people always brought things they'd already written.
I've coded for 30 years and I'm proud of NONE of it. That is, except one ugly hack where I perverted a print spool as a scheduler, which isn't even code.
Personally, I'd love this system (I immediately thought of some code snippets I'd bring!), but I'm curious how you'd handle candidates without any open source projects or contributions who still have a substantial employment history but are unable to show any code from that because it's all proprietary.
It never happened--since they knew in advance, they had time to whip up something cool if there wasn't anything else. It didn't have to be massive. I just wanted to see some clean non-trivial code and a clear understanding of how it worked. Fizzbuzz wouldn't have impressed. :)
Do tools written in shell count?
One of my classmates years ago loved bash. They wrote a filesystem for their OS class in Bash. It was a really, really impressive and bad idea.
That's really cool!