[micheles]

Nowadays I am on the other part of the fence, I am the interviewer. We are not a FAANG, so we just use a SANE interview process. Single interview, we ask the candidate about his CV and what his expectations are, what are his competences and we ask him to show us some code he has written. That's all. The process is fast and extremely effective. You can discriminate week candidates in minutes.

[FirmwareBurner]

>we ask him to show us some code he has written

How do you expect them to get access to the property internal Git repo codebase and approval from their employer's lawyers to show it to third parties during the interview?

Sounds like you're only selecting Foss devs and nothing more.

[ramon156]

Most people have still written code for school or a hobby project. Maybe I'm missing empathy, but I cannot understand how some developers have no code to show.

If that's the case however, just let them make a small project over the weekend and then do another interview where you ask stuff about what they've made. It's not that deep

[user99999999]

My worst code is always what I wrote yesterday. Often what’s missing is context, unless I comment ad nauseam. Sure I didn’t write complete test, obey open closed principles abstract into factory functions. The code I send from my hobby projects is likely a mess, because finishing on my own time by my own unpaid constraints wills it to be so

[ttyprintk]

Maybe you forked a library because of reasons. You can tour the original repo and explain the problems. I have at least one of those examples for each time the legal or confidentiality department stepped in.

[mparnisari]

That process might work for your company precisely because you are not FAANG. You don't get hundreds of applicants that are dying to get in, so people don't have that strong of a motivation to do anything it takes (including lying) to get the job.

[adastra22]

I’ve worked at a company with 150,000 employees. The interview process was pretty much as described here. There is absolutely no reason a Big Co needs to operate any differently.

[_the_inflator]

Do you reevaluate them in predetermined intervals to see how your initial expectation matches the outcome?

[itomato]

With each Sprint, presumably.

[Clubber]

We do this too, works fine. We ask open ended questions like, "What's your favorite thing you've done in your career and why?" and "What was the most challenging project in your career and why?" If you listen, you can get a lot of insight from just those two questions. If they don't give enough detail, we'll probe a little.

Our "gotcha," which doesn't apply to most languages anymore is, "What's the difference between a function and a procedure." It's a one sentence answer, but people who didn't know it would give some pretty enlightening answers.

Edit: From the replies I can see people are a little defensive about not knowing it. Not knowing it is ok because it was a question I asked people 20 years ago relevant to a language long dead in the US. I blame the defensiveness on how FUBAR the current landscape is. Giving a nuanced answer to show your depth of knowledge is actually preferred. A once sentence answer is minimal.

I'm editing this because HN says I'm posting too fast, which is super annoying, but what can I do?

[aleph_minus_one]

> We do this too, works fine. We ask open ended questions like, "What's your favorite thing you've done in your career and why?" and "What was the most challenging project in your career and why?" If you listen, you can get a lot of insight from just those two questions. If they don't give enough detail, we'll probe a little.

The problem is: there is a very negative incentive to give honest answers. If I were to answer these questions honestly, I'd bring up some very interesting theorems (related to some deep algorithmic topics) that I proved in my PhD thesis. Yes, I would have loved to stay in academia, but I switched to industry because of the bad job prospects in academia - this is not what interviewers want to hear. :-(

> "What's the difference between a function and a procedure." It's a one sentence answer

The terminology here differs quite a lot in different "programming communities". For example

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Procedure&oldid=1...

says: "Procedure (computer science), also termed a subroutine, function, or subprogram",

i.e. there is no difference. On the other hand, Pascal programmers strongly distinguish between functions and procedures; here functions return a value, but procedures don't. Programmers who are more attracted to type theory (think Haskell) would rather consider "procedures" to be functions returning a unit type. If you rather come from a database programming background, (stored) procedures vs functions are quite different concepts.

I could go on and on. What I want to point out is that this topic is much more subtle than a "one sentence answer".

[bdavisx]

Here's an interesting thought on your "gotcha" - I'm 57 years old, been programming as a career for over 30 years, a lot of languages and I have no idea what the difference is.

[bluefirebrand]

> Our "gotcha," which doesn't apply to most languages anymore is, "What's the difference between a function and a procedure."

My answer would be along the lines of "It's 2025, no one has talked about procedures for 20+ years"

[downrightmike]

*weak

[masterj]

> Single interview, we ask the candidate about *his* CV and what *his* expectations are, what are *his* competences and we ask *him* to show us some code *he* has written

You... might want to think about what implicit biases you might be bringing here