Hacker News Reader

Comment by donsupreme | Hacker News Reader

I seriously doubt companies who have been coding interview for years now are for legal reasons.

Not coding interviews specifically for legal reasons no, but consistency of interview. If you ask one person a coding question, you should probably do the same for everyone, otherwise you expose yourself to legal liability. This is especially true the larger the company you are interviewing at - and the more generic the role is internally.

You don’t need to adopt this style to avoid discrimination.

Not to avoid discrimination, of course, but to avoid folks suing you for not getting the job - or at least making it easy if/when they do. These are two separate things. Folks tend to get touchy about being told 'no' again especially the bigger your company is. Frankly, interviews will always be imperfect because few will respond in that situation the way they do at the office. This tends to hurt egos.

That this is a sufficient but not necessary solution does not discredit it in the way your tone implies.

>If you ask one person a coding question, you should probably do the same for everyone, otherwise you expose yourself to legal liability.

No! This does not mean you must interview Jr engineers and Sr engineers identically!

You can drop the leet coding requirements for experienced candidates and have no legal worries as long as all similarly experienced candidates are interviewed and judged similarly. It's actually extremely common for companies to have different interviews for different experience levels.

Sorry for the confusion, I was referring to everyone at the same level of seniority.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com