[mtriassi]

I'd love to know a little bit more about how you do that. I'd typically feel wrong asking a candidate to show code they've written at a previous employer.

Do you just ask them to walk you through the architecture by memory? If so what how do you come up with questions about their choices without the specificities of the actual way they wrote their code?

[Scubabear68]

No, I don’t ask them to show me any code or artifacts, but to simply describe the architecture, how it’s put together. Any novel code or algorithms they are proud of. Areas of the code that were problematic, and how they would fix them if they had the chance. Talk about non functional requirements and if the architecture addressed them or not.

Basically see if they could communicate how the system worked, it’s good points and bad points, and how deep they could go. This quickly separates the good developers from the cargo culters and pretenders. It also is a good gauge of how much real experience they have had.

Generally, if someone can’t describe at least the rough outline of the architecture of an application they have worked on, that’s a strong signal they are going to struggle as a developer

[jareklupinski]

> Do you just ask them to walk you through the architecture by memory?

depends on the role, e.g. for infra work i can ask "if you had complete autonomy to stand up this project again, what would be your first step" and then we go from there

[mixmastamyk]

Don’t believe GP was talking about previous code, rather previous design. Perhaps diagraming on a whiteboard.

[EchoChamberMan]

You don't need a whiteboard to talk.