Inspired early on by the story of “Hiring a Juggler” from the book “Peopleware” by DeMarco & Lister, I’ve always advocated for the candidate to code something trivial in front of me, talking out loud as they do it, like computing a standard deviation (I give them the formula). Even such a simple coding task reveals a tremendous amount about how competent a candidate is at coding, and how they think about coding. Remote coding tests are not the same.
In this video I speak about some of my experiences hiring, and how you really need to watch out for a paper-qualified person who can’t code at all. I speak about the importance of hiring above the median, and looking for a good handful of “10x’ers” who can really move the dial.
I pretend to be the candidate, and demonstrate the sort of coding that has knocked my socks off in such an interview. You’ll be very surprised how much you can tell about a coder by watching them code.
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