[glaak]

Consultants are asked case studies. Writers are asked to write something (or submit writing samples). Actors are asked to audition. And programmers are asked to program.

Why shouldn't you validate if a programmer is, in fact, a good programmer (which is a mix of many things, including intelligence)?

[jasonlotito]

Of the 4, only one is asked to do what they do during the interview. Event writers submit existing copy. Or at the very least, prepare it ahead of time before submitting it. Actors auditioning know what they are auditioning for before hand. They can prepare.

Programmers, however, must take a test. It's not an interview, it's a test. Pass or fail (regardless of what people say), it's a test. It's a test of which you have little preparation for. You hope that what they are looking for is what you can provide. What they are asking for is what they will test for (this is fairly often not the case).

[softbuilder]

>And programmers are asked to program

Programmers are almost never asked to program. They are asked to solve 50-year old CS problems on a whiteboard.

[icelancer]

Alright. Let's assume we have this guy, we'll call him a... oh, I dunno, a salesperson. And there are all these cities he must visit to sell his wares. BUT, oh-ho, there's a catch! Let me tell you how many times he can visit each city...

[dspeyer]

At Google, at least, we try to make up new questions frequently and retire old ones.

[Evbn]

There aren't enough problem in the world for that to be possible, ignoring extremely superficial differences.

It always comes down to exercises from CLR lightly dressed up.

[theootz]

Sorry, but what's CLR?

[cagey]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms

[glaak]

"whiteboarding perfect syntax, delving into absurd language minutia and "gotchas", f'ing around w/ brain teasers while an interviewer introduces behavioral stressors (sighs, ticks, etc.) to see how i problem solve "under pressure" ...is all bullshit."

Agreed. That would be bullshit. And those are bad interviewers if they do any of that. Companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook don't do that, as a general rule. I'm sure you could find bad interviewers at any company though.

[rimantas]

Because for programmers what they are asked to do in the interview can (and often is) very different from what they have to do on the job. Unless your job is to reverse strings on the whiteboard.

[mrexroad]

whiteboarding perfect syntax, delving into absurd language minutia and "gotchas", f'ing around w/ brain teasers while an interviewer introduces behavioral stressors (sighs, ticks, etc.) to see how i problem solve "under pressure" ...is all bullshit.

so yeah, ask me to program. i mean, srsly program. let's hack together for an afternoon; hell, let's do a full day of paired programming to knock out a small bug in your code base. you'll learn a hell of a lot more about what i know, how i communicate, steps i take when i do when i don't know something, and what my processes are. this soft, inter-engineer-social stuff is overlooked over far too often; i wan't to work with people who will amplify my process and abilities, and in turn i'll amplify theirs. smarts don't count for enough.

[robocop]

I don't think this approach would scale, due to the time investment required. It also suffers from making it hard to compare one candidate to another in a fair way, unless you have everyone fix the same bugs. Having a bunch of canned bugs to be fixed doesn't seem much better than asking a CS puzzle.

[Evbn]

I Lways ask people to slave a simplified version of an actual problem I have worked on recently. Some times I even learn some thing.

Comparing candidates is irrelevant. You just want N hires that can contribute in your environment.

[jsnk]

I am not saying that programmers should not be validated. Interview questions that are like IQ tests that depend heavily on single spark of inspiration are poor validators of determining productive programmers.

[pjscott]

Actually, how well people do on one of these questions seems to correlate strongly with how well they do on others, so saying that each question depends strongly on a single spark of inspiration is kind of misleading. Where do those sparks of inspiration come from? And why do some people seem to vary so much in their ability to conjure them up on demand?

[rhizome]

Should the writer be asked about semiotics, the actor camera techniques?