Comment by ndriscoll
1 day ago
The short deadlines are because neither the company nor the candidate wants to spend a month on an extended interview. Solving a problem and walking through the thought process are because that's what "coding" is.
1 day ago
The short deadlines are because neither the company nor the candidate wants to spend a month on an extended interview. Solving a problem and walking through the thought process are because that's what "coding" is.
> neither the company nor the candidate wants to spend a month on an extended interview.
So says the companies that insist on multi-round, multi-week interview loops.
I don't know about you, but I've never had to live code a PR and explain to my reviewer what I was thinking while writing the code. By "deadlines" I'm referring to the length of the interview. Take home problems theoretically solve both these issues, but they need to be properly scoped and specified to be valid assessments.
I sit down with juniors and sketch out designs or code for them while talking through the thought process at least once a week, and even when solo coding, I expect everyone produces work that explains itself. For particularly complex/nuanced changes, people do hop on a call to talk through it.
Like I said the deadlines work for both sides. If a company wants to give homework instead of having their own senior engineers spend time talking to me, that tells me what I need to know about how they value my time.
> I sit down with juniors and sketch out designs or code for them while talking through the thought process at least once a week, and even when solo coding, I expect everyone produces work that explains itself. For particularly complex/nuanced changes, people do hop on a call to talk through it.
That's not equivalent to what I said, nor is it live coding.
Again, those deadlines are artificially short compared to real world scenarios, and completely arbitrary. They are so short, in fact, that they render the interview an invalid test of real working ability. A work sample has been proven time and again to be the most valid measure of whether a candidate can actually perform the job, but the conditions under which a live coded "work sample" is performed in an interview render it invalid.
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