Comment by mceachen
2 hours ago
In almost every interview I gave at the last several companies I worked for, I'd start with "This may feel a bit odd, but with this coding problem, I'd appreciate if you spoke through your problem solving. If it helps, pretend like I am your intern. Good ideas, bad ideas, pros and cons of whatever you're considering, it's all valuable information for me to learn a bit about how you approach problems."
I feel like being explicit like this put candidates at a bit more ease than having them try to suss out what the interviewer is expecting from them implicitly (and I know there are many interviewers that will auto-veto any candidate with the audacity to suggest a possibly imperfect approach).
I really wanna ask, because... I'm 46. Been writing code for a living about 30 years, never on a salary, always contractor. I wrote and maintain enough code for non-tech companies that aren't going to take a risk on AI rewrites anytime soon that I can probably coast until retirement. But I haven't interviewed or even needed to sell myself for a long time.
I always thought I would easily pass an interview, but I may have been wrong before all this on the basis that I don't work that well on a team.
OTOH ...is the question now really valuable whether a candidate can explain their thought process rather than deliver? Why wasn't that a question 20 years ago when it actually mattered? Or does it matter more now because the bar needs to be higher, and there's no cache of more experienced devs to train them up?