[rewmie]

> I interviewed one individual who couldn’t even get the REPL started for their project and as they were struggling trying to get it to work I heard them mumble to themself “I should have just use my work computer”. The fact they couldn’t get the most basic aspect of the project to work on their personal meant that they did their coding assignment on their work computer

I've been a candidate who "couldn't even get the most basic aspect of the project to work".

I had been working for years at a company that most developers in the world would sacrifice their firstborn to have a shot at being hired, and I've been using their work laptop for years on end. I considered switching gigs, I answered a recruiter's call, and I found myself in a technical interview using one of my own laptops. Only during the interview did it dawned upon me that my personal laptop had no development tools installed. Why? Because I never used it for work. Worse, I was used to my employer's automated process to setup software development environments, so I had no assurance that I could setup a fully working dev environments in 5 or 10 minutes, let alone the meeting's full hour. If you want to run Python as a REPL on Windows, good luck.

Thankfully my meeting ended up using a webapp to do the pair programming/coding challenge, but if I had to run code on my personal computer I would have to spend far more time setting it up than testing stuff, reschedule the meeting, or simply bail out.

Some companies allocate more than a day to get new candidates to set up a working dev environment and building a project, while assigning an experienced dev to guide them. I know that because I've onboarded half a dozen people and that's what it usually takes.

I'm reading your comment and I'm surprised you didn't noticed how your account does more to document how oblivious you and your team were to critical failures in your hiring process than in assessing the competence of a candidate. How many times per day do you need to setup a software dev environment? Is this how your company gets paid? Is that where you needed additional people to work on? No? Then why on earth are you evaluating them in a completely irrelevant domain? Don't you have people in your team who can spare some minutes documenting and automating that process?

By the way, following that interciew I was extended an offer for a senior position. If the recruiter was like you and I would have been evaluated on my ability to setup a working software dev environment in the allotted time, I'm sure I would have spent over half the meeting googling for where to download the interpreter and how to set it up.

[sbrt]

I can select "run Python as a REPL on Windows" in your post, right click, search and find an answer within a minute.

From my experience, onboarding at companies is a painful process due to internal software, specific setups for complex build processes and (frequently) permissions / annoying processes required for downloading and installing things. Those points are not applicable if you are using publicly available and well documented tools on your own machine.

[rewmie]

> I can select "run Python as a REPL on Windows" in your post, right click, search and find an answer within a minute.

That takes place only after you search for the python installer, download it, install it, check the environment flags, and restart your terminal of choice.

The web is jam-packed with examples of how problematic it is to setup and deploy Python on Windows, and we're not even touching the problem of how some fundamental packages, such as anything involving the file system, is either riddled with platform-specific gotchas or does not work at all.

Setting up a REPL is a far more involved process than it's being casually described in this thread.

[extr]

It can be that simple, but there are plenty of times where the easy route doesn’t work. Sure it’s solvable with 5 minutes of googling and applying the top stack overflow solution, but of course the interview is not the time for that. And there are many other aspects that can throw you off and give the unjust appearance of incompetence.

[jetti]

My anecdote was to show that there are in fact people who use their work computer in order to do projects related to their job search. You have made many assumptions based on my small paragraph.

First, this is a coding challenge that the candidate is given before the technical interview that is well defined in the expectations and is small in scope. They are not expected to spend more than an hour or two on it and they send the recruiter (who is an internal recruiter) a link to their github repo with their completed project before the technical interview is even scheduled. Candidates would have several days and potentially even a week between when they finished the project and when we have the technical interview. The candidates are also told that their project will be gone over in the technical part of the interview. I understand that there are circumstances that would prevent the individual from getting an environment set up on a personal computer but if that is case then just stick with using the work computer.

Second, I never even indicated if the individual was hired or not but you made the assumption that we passed on the candidate. The fact that the candidate couldn't get the repl started was just a tidbit that stuck out to me and I made the comment to my coworker as it is odd to me that a candidate would use their work computer for a job search. We just went with the fact we couldn't use a repl and had the candidate just talk out loud with what he would change when we added different scenarios/requirements.

For what it's worth, the candidate was using a Mac for their personal laptop and so all they would have had to do is run the following in their terminal and it would have gotten them pretty close to being able to run the repl

brew install clojure/tools/clojure

[rsynnott]

Generally, where the candidate is required to have a working local environment, companies will tell the candidate that in the prep material.

It’s surprising how often this is ignored.

[throwaway2037]

Jane Street?