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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

I once tried giving out a homework problem to interviewees and a surprising number of people flat-out cheated!

I absolutely hate "trivia" questions, but I feel like I have to ask people to actually write code during an interview even though it's unrealistic and a bit unfair.

(I also think that if a candidate is flying to the interview, the employer should cover the airfare... but maybe that's why I don't get to hire many people)

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I interviewed a candidate who had an impressive college project involving compilers on his resume. Almost any question I asked him about it was answered with "I don't know, the other guy did it." Even asking him "What did you work on?" resulted in an "I don't remember."

Maybe you should have asked who the other guy was and interviewed him.

How did people cheat? It seems like if you ask them to create or solve something that hasn't been done before they'd have to figure it out.

Of course they could get someone to write the code for them but A. You can catch that by reviewing the code with them and asking questions and B. If they can get someone to write good code for them And then review that code to make sure it's good you might want to put that person in managment.

They could have posted the question onto a site like stackoverflow.

I still don't think a person could intelligently discuss his solution if it was handed to him like that.

And not that I'd advocate hiring a "cheater", But if all the tools he uses to "cheat" eg google, stackoverflow will also be available to him during actual work, it's always possible he could still get the work done.

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