I agree. Though those take-home assignments are easily faked too. We do a sort of pair-programming interview where we present a real task/feature we did in the past, and talk it through while they use a scaffolding we provide in CoderPad. It’s far from a flawless method; people sometimes get nervous and shut down, but most people don’t. I treat it as something we can do together (though they’re writing the code) and root for them to solve it. If I need to, I try to nudge them in the right direction to see how they react to that.
The thing is, I’d rather spend the time discussing the code and algorithms and design choices with someone who has had time to actually think through a problem. The reality is that I don’t care if you generate boilerplate code with the AI as long as you can explain it. I am mostly hiring for DSP roles so there’s plenty of theory to talk about above and beyond the code to ferret out the phonies.
My beef with live coding interviews is that you end up with the exact opposite experience. You get a nervous, scatterbrained engineer who is locked into panic code generation mode and there’s just no time to have a deeper discussion.
I agree. Though those take-home assignments are easily faked too. We do a sort of pair-programming interview where we present a real task/feature we did in the past, and talk it through while they use a scaffolding we provide in CoderPad. It’s far from a flawless method; people sometimes get nervous and shut down, but most people don’t. I treat it as something we can do together (though they’re writing the code) and root for them to solve it. If I need to, I try to nudge them in the right direction to see how they react to that.
The thing is, I’d rather spend the time discussing the code and algorithms and design choices with someone who has had time to actually think through a problem. The reality is that I don’t care if you generate boilerplate code with the AI as long as you can explain it. I am mostly hiring for DSP roles so there’s plenty of theory to talk about above and beyond the code to ferret out the phonies.
My beef with live coding interviews is that you end up with the exact opposite experience. You get a nervous, scatterbrained engineer who is locked into panic code generation mode and there’s just no time to have a deeper discussion.