Comment by throwaway2016a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway2016a | Hacker News Reader

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.

"it effectively has weeded out some people who clearly would not be able to function in their daily job"

Did it, or did it weed out people who got so nervous at being asked to perform for an audience on demand that they froze up? I have social anxiety, and while I've been super lucky to get jobs through referrals of other colleagues (who introduced me ahead of time to folks I would be interviewing with), if I had to do this in front of a bunch of strangers judging me, I'd probably appear to be very bad at my job. How I act normally with people whom I know is very different than how I act around people whom I feel are just there to judge me and decide how worthy I am.

You raise a valid concern I don't have a good answer for you.

I've interviewed people with some pretty severe anxiety who have passed it and some who accepted offers. But that is not to say there wasn't someone weeded out that shouldn't have been.

Although for the people who failed the coding part of it I'd say they definitely behaved more overly confident than anxious.

Edit: with that said I have some experience successfully teaching programming to people with disabilities (in a university setting) which probably makes me a fair amount more qualified than many other higher managers. But again, there are no guarantees.

I too find that when programming in front of people my ability to think logically about the problem is hampered by the other half of my brain trying to analyze the interviewers reactions. I am not able to fully focus on the problem because my mind is constantly distracted.

Growing up I played sports all my life and never had a problem in front of crowds. I suspect this is mainly thanks to the cerebellum acting as a co-processor to the pre-frontal cortex of sorts. In an interview however, there is simply way to much ancillary analysis going on to fully focus on the task at hand.

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