[zebraflask]

A lot of this article rings true with my experience. And I agree with the comments dinging live coding tests - those are the worst. I can't code effectively unless I'm calm and can concentrate, and these things are almost designed to get you off-balance.

Even more galling when you have a healthy GitHub portfolio that they refuse to even look at in favor of a quiz (this has happened recently).

[graphememes]

To note a few things regarding the interview and hiring process (I do a lot of it, have done about 20 in the past two days), the reason for the quiz and not using your portfolio (unless its extremely outstanding and you are fine doing a live coding questionnaire) is so that we can judge all the candidates equally and fairly.

It gives a common baseline to judge. Each candidate does the same thing and we have a good idea of what we are looking for, the rest of it tells us how you think, how you approach your work, organize your work, and best of all? You can compare that to how others do it.

Now, not to say that's everyone, that is what we use it for.

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Before, as an Engineer / Manager, I hated doing "live coding" tests when it wasn't relevant. For example doing "algorithms" or "palindrome" or "sliding window dns" or "O(n)" examples when you're doing front-end or a management position screams to me that the people doing the interviewing don't know what they actually want.

Instead quizzes or live coding that are relevant like "tell me how to access all the elements in this particular element and traverse the children to apply some styling" is much more relevant and will show me the thought process, their ability to retain information, and their recall. It also shows communication ability when they get stuck and ask for help or use me as a sounding board.

It's not always about your implementation, but how you handle the situation and communicate

[zebraflask]

I agree with you about irrelevant questions, and out of the dozen or so coding quizzes I've done over the past several years, mostly with start up companies, those are unfortunately usually what I got. One company was advertising for a front end role and, sensibly enough, asked front end-related questions - that was the exception.

And the thought that quizzes provide a fair point of comparison comes across to me as putting process ahead of substance. Interviewing isn't meant to be fair to everyone - only one person gets the job, after all - so it's not like handing out cookies and stickers in middle school. It's meant to see, in part, whether the person is capable of generating working code. If you have a person who can provide samples to prove it, requiring an artificial quiz really is a slap in the face to a lot of good candidates.

[graphememes]

Well a good interview process has steps that come first to evaluate the individuals substance, certainly if someone is simply approaching an interview going... Here do this quiz, that's not beneficial.

What's important to us is the person, their ability to communicate, learn, interests, then their skill set and what we have is a good fit for them and us.

Focusing on a singular part of the interview without taking a step back and reviewing the whole isn't too beneficial.

[sroussey]

A lot of tech interviewers fall back on college experience of the pop quiz. Or what made them feel smart (which is why standardizing such things across managers is important). Really smart engineers that want to relive the A grades from school will try and be clever and undo such standards.

That all said, the correlation between great whiteboard / coding tricks and them being a successful part of a team isn't so great. It's not their job to code short programs under pressure of being watched. It's a proxy. There are better ways.