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Please stop the coding challenges

(blackentropy.bearblog.dev)
261 points CrazyEmi | 1 comments | 15 Nov 24 15:32 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | source
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tga ◴[15 Nov 24 16:06 UTC] No.42148125[source]▶
So we should stop the coding challenges, stop LeetCode, stop whiteboarding, stop profiling candidates, stop asking for their GitHub page. How is hiring supposed to work then? Just post the contract online and the first one to mail it back gets the job?

I like live coding challenges, something like a ~2 hour pair programming session, ideally modifying an existing project. I invest as much time as each candidate, while we are both exploring whether we want to work together.

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1. gdiamos ◴[15 Nov 24 16:11 UTC] No.42148186[source]▶
I personally hire people I’ve worked with before and I know what they can do.

If I can’t do that, I ask to see their prior work.

Good programmers have usually written a lot of code. Having them walk through and explain it usually gives a good idea of what they can do and how they think.

Sometimes you meet a programmer who only works on proprietary code and can’t share it.

In that case I ask them to explain the design of something similar, and write a modestly sized example of a component of that system. Watching them in their own dev environment for 30 minutes usually tells you all you need to know.