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Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

> * 1.5-2 hour pair programming exercise using the actual language & framework they'd most likely be using for the job

This advantages people who have actually used that language/framework for prior jobs. If that's a thing you want to optimize for, then that's fine. If you want to evaluate people as more generic software developers, it's not so great.

That's why whiteboarding algorithm questions can be useful. They're sufficiently abstract to generalize to lots of different 'stacks' and experience levels. If you just want to get generally competent developers first and then figure out where to put them later, then this type of question can make a lot of sense, which is why Google, Facebook, et al. use them.

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Algorithm questions may be more “general” than doing something like the actual work being performed, but frankly most programmers aren’t writing optimized low level algorithms on a day to day basis. All you get is people who’ve memorized the algorithm tricks.

It's not as simple as just memorizing "algorithm tricks". There are too many possible questions to just memorize all the answers, you need reasonably strong CS fundamentals, and also to be fairly smart. I think that's part of why they're used: actual IQ tests are legally fraught, but giving someone what amounts to a programming IQ test is not.

It's certainly true that studying these kinds of questions helps, but if you're not too bright, I don't think that would take you very far.

Strong CS fundamentals is understanding all the various patterns and tricks in algorithms and data structures, and how they could be applied to problems outside of where you originally learned them. That is it, outside of actual CS research work, when applied to an actual software job. Ask any self taught person how much they need “CS fundamentals” to blow the pants of any business need for an app and they’ll tell you probably very little.

When you’re doing tools for programmers, it gets a lot more complicated. That is not most jobs.

My process is pretty much same as above, with the difference that I let them choose whatever framework/language they feel most comfortable with (with obvious caveat that I might not be able to help them if they get stuck).

If you are good dev, you will pick up any language/frameworks quite quickly if you want to (there are exceptions, like switching to completly different paradigm e.g. from JS to Haskell, but that is not our case).

Generally-speaking if we're hiring someone to work in React or, say, Kotlin for Android, they need to know at least a bit about the framework they're working with. The process would be different for co-op positions/new hires directly out of school, and obviously we'd tweak it for a clearly awesome developer who is in the process of retooling.

Is that really true? Learning a framework or language isn't especially arduous. My team works in C++. I have zero C++ requirement for hiring on my team because in my experience every good hire can pick it up very fast. If I restricted myself to people who can sit down and run with C++ then I'm winnowing my pool of candidates.

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