Comment by CharlieDigital

This is harder than it sounds, although I agree in a vacuum the idea is a good one.

So much value of the code review comes from having actual knowledge of the larger context. Mundane stuff like formatting quirks and obvious bad practices should be getting hoovered up by the linters anyways. But what someone new may *not* know is that this cruft is actually important for some arcane reason. Or that it's important that this specific line be super performant and that's why stylistically it's odd.

The real failure mode I worry about here is how much of this stuff becomes second nature to people on a team. They see it as "obvious" and forgot that it's actually nuance of their specific circumstances. So then a candidate comes in and misses something "obvious", well, here's the door.

I like the code review approach and tried it a few times when I was needed to do interviews.

The great thing about code reviews is that there are LOTS of ways people can improve code. You can start with the basics like can you make this code run at all (i.e. compile) and can you make it create the right output. And there's also more advanced improvements like how to make the code more performant, more maintainable, and less error-prone.

Also, the candidates can talk about their reasoning about why or why not they'd change the code they're reviewing.

For example, you'd probably view the candidates differently based on their responses to seeing a code sample with a global variable.

Poor: "Everything looks fine here"

Good: "Eliminate that global variable. We can do that by refactoring this function to..."

Better: "I see that there's a global variable here. Some say they're an anti-pattern, and that is true in most but not all cases. This one here may be ok if ..., but if not you'll need to..."

Some of the most interesting interviews that I felt like accurately assessed my skills (even non-live ones) where debugging and code review assessments. I didn't get offers from these cos later on because I failed the leetcodes they did later in the process but I felt the review interviews were a good way to be assessed.

I loved the idea of code reviews interviews, i've had several good ones, until yesterday when I had my first bad code review interview.

They asked me to review a function for a residential housing payment workflow, which I'm unfamiliar with. From an actual snippet of their bad production code (which has since been rewritten). In Go which I've never used (I've never professionally used the language that doesn't have error handling built-in, for example).

I had to spend more than half of my time asking questions to try and get enough context about Go error handling techniques, the abstractions they were using which we only had the import statements to and the way that the external system was structured to handle these requests to review the hundred lines of code they shared.

I was able to identify a bunch of things incidentally, like making all of the DB changes as part of a transaction so that we don't get inconsistent state or breaking up the function into sub functions, because the names were extremely long, but this was so far outside my area of expertise and comfort zone that I felt like shooting in the dark.

So just like any other interview style, they can be done very poorly.

I don't know. A cold code review on a codebase they never saw is not super informative about how the candidate would interact with you and the code once they're in known territory.

Is there a site where one could review some code and see what many others say about it and their experience level?

I guess it would degrade to stackoverflow-like poems eventually, but still interesting.

The demo video on your homepage looks great! If I may ask, what recording software did you use to create and edit the video?

I did this once and it was obvious the interviewer wanted me to point out his pet "gotcha." Not a great experience.

Yep, I've done a lot of SQL interviews and it is always interesting to see the folks who've crash and burned at code review and killed it at writing individual queries and sometimes the unexpected, the opposite happened, the person would fly through a code review and do really subpar on writing it, a signal I usually took to mean that the person was nervous as hell in the interview.

The two folks who showed this behavior I hired anyway (they were contractors so nbd) and they were excellent hires, so I really love the code review approach for climbing up bloom's taxonomy.