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by carusooneliner 2532 days ago
During coding interviews, I'm looking for the following evidence in a candidate:

1. how good is the candidate at problem solving?

2. is the candidate able to think in code?

3. are there any glaring syntax errors?

To assess the above three, a whiteboard, paper or Google Docs is sufficient. I'm not averse to using an IDE, just that the IDE's syntax checking hints will shift the candidate's focus to writing syntactically accurate code (#3) rather than on the problem (#1 and #2).
1 comments
diehunde 2532 days ago
If all the interviewers were like that I'd be OK with using whatever they want. But one time I was doing a Python exercise on a google doc and I was missing a colon after an if statement. The guy had me for a couple of minutes trying to find my "error" without telling me it was syntax. The algorithm was correct.

The other problem I see is when you don't agree on something with the interviewer. One guy made me write some fictitious SQL queries on a doc and then asked me some questions. He was wrong about several things but we didn't have any way to test it. I was so shocked he didn't know that stuff that I had to tested after to see if I was actually wrong, but no.

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