And that’s why we’re moving away from coding games where I work. Bad people try to cheat, good people can panic and shit the bed.
When I do interviews, I’m more interested in the candidate’s relevant experience, what kind of issues they faced, how they were solved, if they think they could have done things differently, and how they think. Code itself is irrelevant unless I can review a sprint’s worth of PRs.
When I ask more technical questions, I never ask for code but for an explanation on how they would tackle the problem. For example, I often ask about finding a simple solution to get all data relevant to a certain date in two, simple, historized tables. If you know window functions, it’s trivial. If you don’t, your solution will be slow and dirty and painful. But as most devs don’t know about window functions anyway, it lets me see how they approach the issue and if they understand what parts should have a trivial solution to make it simple.
This is why I prefer live interviews. I tell them they can use whatever tools they want, search for anything they want, there are no restrictions. All I ask is that they share their entire screen (if not in person) and try to “think out loud” as much as possible. I then time-box each step (usually 15m ea in a 1-hour interview).
I am most interested in HOW they solve the challenges I set out for them. Whether they complete it or not is usually irrelevant.
Edit: Lately, though - I warn against AI. I don’t ban it, but every person that has tried to use AI in an interview has gone down in flames. AI simply cannot be trusted… and if you haven’t learned that lesson, and you can’t even tell when it’s giving you bad information… yikes.
I use ChatGPT sometimes to give me a pointer in what directions I could go/research more for a given problem. But if I ever take the code provided by it, I need to review it line by line and half the time it doesn’t even compile anyway. At this point it’s just a helper to suggest to me what to google for and then I do the rest😅
And that’s why we’re moving away from coding games where I work. Bad people try to cheat, good people can panic and shit the bed.
When I do interviews, I’m more interested in the candidate’s relevant experience, what kind of issues they faced, how they were solved, if they think they could have done things differently, and how they think. Code itself is irrelevant unless I can review a sprint’s worth of PRs.
When I ask more technical questions, I never ask for code but for an explanation on how they would tackle the problem. For example, I often ask about finding a simple solution to get all data relevant to a certain date in two, simple, historized tables. If you know window functions, it’s trivial. If you don’t, your solution will be slow and dirty and painful. But as most devs don’t know about window functions anyway, it lets me see how they approach the issue and if they understand what parts should have a trivial solution to make it simple.
This is why I prefer live interviews. I tell them they can use whatever tools they want, search for anything they want, there are no restrictions. All I ask is that they share their entire screen (if not in person) and try to “think out loud” as much as possible. I then time-box each step (usually 15m ea in a 1-hour interview).
I am most interested in HOW they solve the challenges I set out for them. Whether they complete it or not is usually irrelevant.
Edit: Lately, though - I warn against AI. I don’t ban it, but every person that has tried to use AI in an interview has gone down in flames. AI simply cannot be trusted… and if you haven’t learned that lesson, and you can’t even tell when it’s giving you bad information… yikes.
Man live coding interviews sound like a nightmare to me.
It’s not so bad once you’ve got your teeth into the problem
assuming you can code, that is
Can I interview with you lol - this sounds great!
I use ChatGPT sometimes to give me a pointer in what directions I could go/research more for a given problem. But if I ever take the code provided by it, I need to review it line by line and half the time it doesn’t even compile anyway. At this point it’s just a helper to suggest to me what to google for and then I do the rest😅
I approach interviews for penetration testing positions in the same way, just with hacking challenges!