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by tragic
4435 days ago
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It seems like people have vastly varying ideas about what constitutes a 'technical interview'. For my money, I'd expect that most interviews in any field are technical to some degree. If you're hiring an HR person at any level of seniority at all, presumably you'll be asking questions that bear on employment/tax law, dispute resolution and so forth - in short, questions that bear on a body of specialised knowledge: technical questions. The problem is execution. Having never been asked to do code on a whiteboard, I can't comment on whether that's any use. (I think I'd be OK provided it was acceptable to drop into pseudocode: surely we're not testing for encyclopaedic knowledge of every method in X language's standard library.) 'Homework' challenges have the advantage, if they're executed right, that whoever you're hiring won't be going in completely cold to whatever tech you're using - may as well get some of that newbie-googling done in advance. (Just did one for a job using Mongo/Mongoid - what I knew about that beforehand would have fit on the back of a cigarette packet.) |
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My experience and impression is its generally the opposite.
Whiteboard is a good place for psuedocode, data flow diagrams, schemas, flowcharts, block diagrams, data structures, and bug related examples. Its a pretty bad spot for source code other than one line notes. I usually have scratch paper with scribbles all over it when I'm coding, so that seems fair. I don't think I've ever written anything in Clojure without a REPL open, it would be a weird experience to write something out entirely on a whiteboard without running all the little parts first. Also the test-driven experience is very weird if you can't actually run tests. Its like testing someones teamwork skills by having them work alone, very strange.
I feel a professional obligation to begin all projects with a bit of google to at least prove I'm not wasting effort on NIH and find some pitfalls, so the suggestions to test a dev without any net access also feels extremely weird to me.
I think the primary fail of tech interviews is its nothing more than a stress test, selecting for candidates who don't really care, or at least are unnaturally calm, and that doesn't seem to correlate very well with ability.