Hacker News Reader

Comment by fbuilesv | Hacker News Reader

One of the advantages that proponents of reviewing the candidate's code before the interview have is that you don't have to spend any time doing FizzBuzz kind of problems, which are just time wasters.

If you're interviewing people who can't print the numbers 1-100 then something in your process is just wrong. Why did they get that far?

View on HN

Asking FizzBuzz is a lot easier than reviewing code, which may or may not be theirs.

If they have a github/bitbucket, this will show more than answering silly questions.

Until you have someone who just gives you the link to someone else's github account. You'd be amazed at what people do.

Who said it was supposed to be easy?

that's simple: people lie on their resumes and can talk a good game. Until you actually ask them to write code (or they have public code available), it's impossible to tell if they used PHP for a week per employer (making up 5 years of 'experience') or if they work with it day to day.

This! I can't believe how many people are ditching the coding interviews here. You're guaranteed to hire a few lemons if you don't do them.

The inability to write simple routines in a language you claim to be familiar with is a NO HIRE. Be it at a whiteboard (its not like one cares about syntax errors) or at a PC/laptop.

Unless you accidentally have in-depth knowledge of the exact work an interviewee did in his last job, assessing their skill in what they did can be very difficult.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com