| "make them write code in the interview... Because now they can't program"
This comes across disrespectful and presumptious. It is the interviewer's job to check the possible reasons to not hire someone and validate that the they aren't going to be problems. One of the possible reasons to not hire someone whose last job was "architect" is that they have lost contact with coding. If they have, then from experience I can tell you that they won't want to go back to coding, and their architectures are losing contact with reality. They are a liability. This observation is not original to me. The first time that I saw it made explicit was when I took interviewing training while I was at Google. Google's experience is that a certain fraction of architects avoid coding. That fraction makes really bad hires. So they explicitly told people to look for that in the interview so that don't wind up accidentally hiring them. But if someone's title is "architect" and they can code, then that isn't a concern. Companies do tend to promote good programmers to architect, and you don't want to miss out on those programmers. Firstly, do you believe that if you have not coded for 4-5 years you become useless just becauss you don't know the latest %fad% framework? This is a straw man argument. I said nothing about "latest fad framework". The exercise is to write some code, not write code in any particular framework or language. Go ahead and be offended at something that I didn't say, but please remember that I didn't say it. Secondly, the whole phrasing just conveys disrespect for cadidate, where the only responce to 'jump' is 'how high'. If an interviewee objects to writing code in the interview, how are they going to respond when they're asked to write code on the job? Seriously, if they get offended in the way that you just did, that's a good reason not to hire. If someone is interviewing for non-code postition they might tell you to take a hike. I do not want to work in an organization where "architect" is a non-coding position. Seen that, left in horror. So if I'm interviewing you, you are almost certainly being hired for a coding position. The idea that a contrived 30 minute coding session tells you more about a candidate that studying code they've previously written or debugging together is idiotic. It doesn't tell you more, but it tells you something different. In particular it tells the difference between someone who shows their own code versus shows someone else's code and lies about the source. (Yes, I have seen that.) |
Everything in your responce sounds to me like in your view, architect is 'extra senior' developer, whereas I understand it to be a different job. Isn't what you are describing a principal engineer?
"In particular it tells the difference between someone who shows their own code versus shows someone else's code and lies about the source. (Yes, I have seen that.)"
To eliminate that possibility, you can ask questions about the code, how it was designed, etc. Presumably if they stole the code, they are not going to know it inside-out, like the author would.