http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=919246


in reply to Re^2: Common Software Development Mistakes
in thread Common Software Development Mistakes

I will often ask candidates to write down a few lines off code on a white board, or a piece of paper, but in those cases, I usually don't really care about the details of the code, as I will ask them to explain what they are doing.

But I wasn't getting the impression that was the kind of coding being referred to by the OP. I've heard from other companies giving coding tasks that exceed the size of a whiteboard - but I've never heard of any research done about the value of this. We've discussed this at our company (that is, giving potential hires a coding task), but we're rejected it; the cost of creating a task that's representative of the work we are doing is just too great. (And since we get in lots of candidates, we'd need to cycle between tasks, as people do pass around the questions that have been asked). We care more about people fitting in the development methodology than about their exact level of Perl coding (which can be trained).

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Re^4: Common Software Development Mistakes
by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on Aug 08, 2011 at 21:54 UTC

    But I wasn't getting the impression that was the kind of coding being referred to by the OP. I've heard from other companies giving coding tasks that exceed the size of a whiteboard - but I've never heard of any research done about the value of this.
    I've never asked them to write large projects in an interview, though I've sometimes asked to see some large projects they have written (e.g. a CPAN module).

    As indicated in the root node, I feel the cost of hiring the wrong person is enormous and so I feel it is well worth doing much more than a simple one hour job interview. I prefer multiple one-on-one interviews with multiple interviewers. During these interviews, candidates will be asked to write code and solve problems. Also, cultural fit is assessed (often by asking behavorial questions). BTW, Google typically perform five one-on-one 45 minute interviews after you get through screening. To offset the high cost of multiple interviews, you need to find cheap ways to screen out the glaringly incompetent and the resume liars and simple coding questions are a good way to do that in my experience. I cannot rigorously prove that all this effort is worth the cost. More details of my preferred approach to interviewing can be found in On Interviewing and Interview Questions.