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by krisoft
875 days ago
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> Not unheard of, but unusual. At my company we tell people that they should feel free to google or consult references at practical coding challenges. > It seems hard to test someone's knowledge that way. I don’t really want to test knowledge but skill. Can you do the thing? At work you will have access to these references so why not during the interview? Now that doesn’t mean that we are not taking note when you go searching and what you go searching for. If you told us that you spent the last 8 years of your life working with python and you totally blank on the syntax of how to write a class that is suspicious. If you don’t remember the argument order of some obscure method? Who cares. If you worked in so many languages that you don’t remember if the Lock class in this particular one is reentrant or not and have to look it up? You might even get “bonus points” for saying something like that because it demonstrates a broad interest and attention to detail. (Assuming that using a Lock is reasonable in the situation and so on of course :)) |
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I do want to understand their knowledge. I'll preface questions with the disclaimer that I am not looking for the book definition of a concept, but to understand if the candidate understands the topic and to what depth. I'll often tell them that if they dont know, just say so. I'll start with a simple question and keep digging deeper until either they bottom out or I do.