[seer]

Live coding during an interview is one of the most oppressive things I’ve witnessed in the industry in general.

There is usually a huge disconnect between someone who knows that “this task should take 20mins” and doing it cold in a super high-pressure environment.

People sweat, panic, brain freeze, and are just plain out stressed.

I’ll only OK something like this if we give out a similar but not the same task before the interview so a person can train a bit beforehand.

I’ve heard it all justified as “we want to see how you perform under pressure” but to me that has always sounded super flimsy - like if this is representative of how work is done at this organisation, then do I want to work there in the first place? And if it isn’t, why the hell are you putting people through this ringer in the first place, just sounds inhumane.

[ryandrake]

Yea, there's really no way to do an "interview assignment" well.

If you give unlimited amount of time, you're giving an advantage to people with no life who can just focus on your assignment and polish it as if it were a full time job.

If you give a limited amount of time, then you're making the interview a pressure cooker with a countdown clock, giving a disadvantage to people who are just not great at working under minute-to-minute time pressure.

[fc417fc802]

Depends on the purpose. If you treat it as a minimum bar to pass and are up front about and actually adhere to that then anyone spending more than the limit on it is presumably just wasting his own time (and to an extent the company's because the application process continues). It only becomes a problem if instead of an objective pass/fail metric you start gauging other details that would benefit from additional time spent.