I asked candidates to bring me some code they were proud of and teach me how it worked. Weeded out people really quickly and brought quality candidates to the top. On two separate occasions we hired devs with zero experience in the language or framework and they rocked it. Trythat with your coding interview, eh? 🙂
I’ve coded for 30 years and I’m proud of NONE of it. That is, except one ugly hack where I perverted a print spool as a scheduler, which isn’t even code.
Personally, I’d love this system (I immediately thought of some code snippets I’d bring!), but I’m curious how you’d handle candidates without any open source projects or contributions who still have a substantial employment history but are unable to show any code from that because it’s all proprietary.
That sounds like a good plan in many situations… But how do you handle candidates who say something like “look, there’s heaps of code that I’m proud of and would love to walk you through, but it’s all work I’ve done for past companies and don’t have access (or the legal right) to show you?”
You might just say “well the ideal candidate has meaningful projects outside of work,” and just eliminate the others… But it seems like you’d lose out on many otherwise great candidates that way.
But how do you handle candidates who say something like “look, there’s heaps of code that I’m proud of and would love to walk you through, but it’s all work I’ve done for past companies and don’t have access (or the legal right) to show you?”
It never once happened. They always knew in advance, so they could code something up if they felt like it.
I asked candidates to bring me some code they were proud of and teach me how it worked. Weeded out people really quickly and brought quality candidates to the top. On two separate occasions we hired devs with zero experience in the language or framework and they rocked it. Trythat with your coding interview, eh? 🙂
I’ve coded for 30 years and I’m proud of NONE of it. That is, except one ugly hack where I perverted a print spool as a scheduler, which isn’t even code.
Personally, I’d love this system (I immediately thought of some code snippets I’d bring!), but I’m curious how you’d handle candidates without any open source projects or contributions who still have a substantial employment history but are unable to show any code from that because it’s all proprietary.
Do tools written in shell count?
One of my classmates years ago loved bash. They wrote a filesystem for their OS class in Bash. It was a really, really impressive and bad idea.
That sounds like a good plan in many situations… But how do you handle candidates who say something like “look, there’s heaps of code that I’m proud of and would love to walk you through, but it’s all work I’ve done for past companies and don’t have access (or the legal right) to show you?”
You might just say “well the ideal candidate has meaningful projects outside of work,” and just eliminate the others… But it seems like you’d lose out on many otherwise great candidates that way.
It never once happened. They always knew in advance, so they could code something up if they felt like it.