[vlttnv]

> You Can Ask the Candidate to Present Code they Wrote.

I have always wondered why this isn't more common, it makes so much sense to me. When you submit an application you usually submit links to your blog, GitHub, projects etc. When I attend an interview I expect us to talk about those things. This is what the person is supposed to be good at. Instead you are met with a predefined set of puzzle questions.

I think the purpose of the interview is to allow the candidate to show what they are good at and what they are excited about and to see if this fits well with what your company is doing.

[repiret]

When I was young and single, I programmed in my free time.

Now I have a wife and three kids and a house and I like woodworking and flying and fixing up old buildings. I sell all of my programming output to my employer, who doesn't happen to make open source. In my free time, I play with my kids or fix something on a house or build something in my shop or something that doesn't leave a mark on GitHub.

If you are evaluating me for a job and ask me to show you some code I've written recently, I can't do it. I do want you to test me, because I want to work in a shop where everybody can pull their weight - I've worked in shops that don't test candidates, and they end up with some really bad programmers who are sometimes decent sweet talkers. But give me something on a whiteboard, or a take home thing that I can finish in a couple hours after the kids go to bed, or just let me bang on a keyboard in your offices or whatever.

If you ask your candidates to show you some code they wrote, you're selecting for candidates who either do open source in their day job, or don't have hobbies that don't produce code. There's lots of great programmers that meet neither of those criteria.

[vlttnv]

Fair point! I guess if I can edit my statement a bit I'd phrase it like that: If from my application you can see that I have work that we can talk about and discuss, let's do that, if not then let's do the predefined questions. That's fine.

I've had a couple of situations where I go in an interview and the interviews ask me questions that show to me that they have not even looked at my CV and the cover letter they asked me to write. They were just reading off a list of generic tech interview questions.

To me that feels like if I went to interview at a company and told them I have no idea who they are or what they do, I just know their name and that they are looking for a coder. That's just counterproductive.

But I totally agree with you that there is no single solution. I just think there are different "good" questions for different people, interviewers and interviewees need to adapt to that.