Why I Don't Do Live Coding Interviews

I am also not a fan of the "hey code this while I watch you" process. There is no reality to this process, I have written code that many of the people "testing" me would not have ever considered, does that make me some super programmer? NO, it makes me a guy that had no other choice so I learned it and did it. Asking me to write your next brainfuck interpreter or whatever algorithm you want may or may not result in positive results, but either way you will learn very little of what I am capable of in your pre determined time period.

If you want to know what I can offer after 25+ years in this industry, look at what I have done, talk to me for 15 minutes without the entitled attitude that tells me you are a new grad and have no real world experience. That fact is, I don't care if you are a new grad, but I admit I do get excited when I meet new grads because that means I can likely learn things from you, at least as much as you can learn from me. But in the end, don't BS me, I've written production level code for years and (overall) know the reality versus your fiction you are telling yourself.

In the end, I don't mind hard questions or questions that are related to the issue you will have me solve. But to ask me to write an array reversal in Javascript and I do so at a low level and you ding me cause I didn't use some new fangled framework is just an indictment of your own education not my experience.

Coding Interviews are like testing a Marathon runner by how fast they can run the 100 meter dash. Sure people who struggle in the 100 meters will also probably struggle in a marathon, but the best marathon runners aren't always the fastest sprinters.

From the subheading: "Live coding interviews test culture fit under the guise of testing competence."

When I'm interviewing it's not a guise. I am very clearly interviewing you for:

- cultural fit

- how you approach the problem

- and how well you communicate

For us the actual code we ask to write is very simple. Think fizz buzz. I would never dream to ask to, for example, write code to balance a binary tree. I think those questions are crazy. 90% of our team couldn't do that on a white board and that's completely OK because it's not a skill you need day-to-day. If I based decisions on those kind of algorithms I wouldn't have hired most of our team and it would have been our loss not theirs.

With that said, some people couldn't complete our basic challenge so even though it's not intended as a code competency hurdle, it effectively has weeded out some people who clearly would not be able to function in their daily job.

I'm not sure how I'd react if someone outright refused to do it. I guess I'll deal with that if it happens.