[swish_bob]

I guess it depends how far back you're starting from. I suspect most Java developers don't spend that much time creating projects from scratch (I do, but the work environments I'm used to suggest I'm an outlier).

I tend to give candidates a simple project already to go, with junit and hamcrest, possibly mockito already available, and ask them to go from there using a provided IDE (which I attempt to get set up as near as they prefer to work as I can). This generally works out fine. I certainly don't feel the boiler-platiness of the language gets in the way, mostly because the IDE is generally capable of doing most of the lifting with that respect anyway, but also because over the timescale of an interview question, we're generally only talking about a couple of classes at most.

[sethammons]

It starts from scratch. Familiarity with one's tooling is important. Setting up a project seems like it should be part of the basics. Would it not be unfair to others who choose a different language if Java gets hand holding in terms of initial classes?

For 20% of Java candidates, they do it just fine. Heck, a few echew the IDE and are fine working completely from the terminal (these tend to be particularly very solid at coding). Still wrestling with the idea.

The folks that already work with us (who wrote Java in a former role) see no problem with setting up a project nor do the folks that we hired recently (seeing as they likely passed that technical interview). But that all could be bias.

Maybe you are right. Maybe the next candidate or five in Java will get a base project and we can see how it goes.

[YawningAngel]

Do you give them "their" tooling? I can set up a project of the type you describe in about five seconds, because I have a template for it in my IDE. The best defaults for this that I've seen are provided by IntelliJ (do you provide this in interviews? It seems legally challenging to do) and would probably take me 5-10 minutes to navigate.

I think Java depends much more heavily on powerful tooling to do the heavy lifting, and my experience of using that tooling when I haven't had a chance to configure it in advance has been pretty miserable.

[swish_bob]

If they're coming in, I'll hand them a laptop with the project set up and ready to go, with IntelliJ running. If they're normally an Eclipse user I'll swap to Eclipse shortcuts and help them manage the IDE as we go.

If it's remote, I'll ask them to share their screen with me with a project set up and ready to go, having emailed them a copy of the interface we're going to implement about 30 minutes before the interview.

[YawningAngel]

Fair enough, seems like you're giving them a fair shake.

[swish_bob]

It depends on context as well. Where I currently work, they wouldn't have a chance. The corporate firewall will prevent them talking to Nexus, for example. It just wouldn't be fair to expect them to navigate that sort of thing in an interview.

In general, if I'm asking them to code on my (or the company's) hardware, I'd start from an existing project, if only because I wouldn't expect them to be familiar with the installed tools (oh, you use maven? I'm a gradle user ... etc.) On their own laptop, I'd expect them to be more comfortable.

I'm doing a remote interview on Wednesday. That'll be on the candidates machine (because screen-sharing is easy, getting them inside the corporate network, not happening), and they've been told they'll need an IDE ready to go. I'll expect a project set up and ready to go before the call even starts.

[mancerayder]

What happens if they can't work from home? They're expected to take time off, AND prepare beforehand?

What round is this?

[swish_bob]

On your own hardware, I'd expect you to be able to have a blank project up in minutes, so yes, I expect somebody who's not travelling to our site to be able to take 5 minutes out of their busy day to create a blank project.

[swish_bob]

> Familiarity with one's tooling is important. Setting up a project seems like it should be part of the basics. Would it not be unfair to others who choose a different language if Java gets hand holding in terms of initial classes?

Also, how much of their day-to-day work is going to be setting up new projects? I sometimes feel a better test is to be thrown into an existing code base and asked to make a change. It's far more indicative of the sort of work somebody is likely to actually be doing.