Comment by alphazard
1 day ago
Live coding works extremely well as part of a more comprehensive interview process. You have to make the question very easy to account for nerves. Done well, it should weed out the worst candidates, while accidentally letting some no-hires through, but never dropping a good candidate. If you make the question resemble anything like actual work, then you will be dropping good candidates. It's the wrong format for that.
A live coding exercise should be like 15 minutes of time at the start of an interview. If it goes well, tell the candidate they did great, and then get to the real interview. If it doesn't go well, you can cut the interview short, and thank the candidate for their time. There's no point in talking to someone about a programming role if they can't program. e.g. basic control flow in a language of their choosing.
People who can't program will sneak through your hiring funnel and into contact with your engineers. It's a question of rates, not absolutes. The cost of not catching them quickly can be 1000s of dollars in engineer time.
> You have to make the question very easy to account for nerves.
What's funny is that this current madness all started with Joel Spolsky [0] complaining that "199 out of 200 programmers can't code", which ultimately lead to the development of the now famous "FizzBuzz" [1] (is it still famous?) which was meant to be exactly what you're describing: Just a simple test that you can write a program from scratch.
It's also worth pointing out that Joel was writing about an entirely different world of software engineering. In the shadow of the dotcom bust their were still loads of mediocre programmers hiding out in corporate dev teams just modifying existing files. But when asked to build something from scratch, they literally didn't know where to start.
0. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/01/27/news-58/
1. https://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-de...
> their were still loads of mediocre programmers hiding out in corporate dev teams
This is still the case. As long as the industry pays well, it will attract imposters. At most companies, you just have to sneak through the interview process, and blending in from there is easy.