[Paul-Craft]

I don't know about you, but I've never had to live code a PR and explain to my reviewer what I was thinking while writing the code. By "deadlines" I'm referring to the length of the interview. Take home problems theoretically solve both these issues, but they need to be properly scoped and specified to be valid assessments.

[ndriscoll]

I sit down with juniors and sketch out designs or code for them while talking through the thought process at least once a week, and even when solo coding, I expect everyone produces work that explains itself. For particularly complex/nuanced changes, people do hop on a call to talk through it.

Like I said the deadlines work for both sides. If a company wants to give homework instead of having their own senior engineers spend time talking to me, that tells me what I need to know about how they value my time.

[Paul-Craft]

> I sit down with juniors and sketch out designs or code for them while talking through the thought process at least once a week, and even when solo coding, I expect everyone produces work that explains itself. For particularly complex/nuanced changes, people do hop on a call to talk through it.

That's not equivalent to what I said, nor is it live coding.

Again, those deadlines are artificially short compared to real world scenarios, and completely arbitrary. They are so short, in fact, that they render the interview an invalid test of real working ability. A work sample has been proven time and again to be the most valid measure of whether a candidate can actually perform the job, but the conditions under which a live coded "work sample" is performed in an interview render it invalid.

[ndriscoll]

It's not artificial: the company has a day of my time. I have a day of their time. We both want me to meet several people on the team to see if it's a good fit. Because of the constraint, we keep it to relatively simple discussions around toy problems that can be solved in an hour.

[Paul-Craft]

Yes, it is artificial. Everything about a live coding interview is artificial. Code doesn't get written in 1 hour blocks while someone's watching over one's shoulder, all the while asking questions to interrupt one's thought process, in any company I've ever worked for.

[ndriscoll]

Like I said, this is literally a thing I do all the time. I have standing 1 hour blocks for each of my team members every week and it's not uncommon for us to build out the skeleton of a problem solution together. I literally did what you said on Wednesday for someone for a gitlab change because I don't expect they know how secret injection works, but I want them to know. And absolutely I've encouraged them to ask questions, and I ask them questions to check their understanding.

[Paul-Craft]

Like I said, that's not the same. It's not comparable in terms of stakes, or expected outputs. You're not addressing the issue.