Comment by fweespeech
11 years ago
Why not just take a chunk of code the candidate has written that was interesting and talk about it?
The main problem with interviews [imo] is it grabs stuff the interviewer is familiar with and throws it at the person in the more stressful position of being the interviewee. Its also [often] a very non-standard way of communicating. I don't know about you but all of my communication is via text or graphic, not whiteboard.
And, honestly, do you care more about the fact they can invert a binary tree from memory? Or that they can learn to in the next hour and implement it?
My guess is for 90% of jobs, its the second.
The point about interviewer vs. interviewee familiarity with the problem is important. It's hard to avoid comparing the interviewee's off-the-cuff solution to one that was researched at leisure and refined over multiple previous interviews. Really damn hard. Psychologists and teachers are trained in avoiding that kind of bias, and still struggle. Very few engineers are equipped to see through the "fog" and interpret a candidate's performance in a useful way. I've only encountered one - a recently former CS prof - and I've been in the business a long time.