Ask HN: Best way to do a coding exercise for a phone screen?
1) We want to do a phone screen before onsite interviews and
2) we want to have the candidates do a simple coding exercise as part of the phone screen.
As part of our phone screen we make all candidates do a simple coding exercise during the interview. It's at the fizbuzz and Steve Yegge phone screen blog post level. ie one of....
- Write a function to reverse a string.
- Write a function to compute the Nth fibonacci number.
- Print out the grade-school multiplication table up to 12 x 12.
- Find the largest int value in an int array.
We do this as we've had people who we've brought in for onsite interviews that couldn't code at all.
My question is what should we be using for phone screen coding exercises?
Currently I'm using a shared google doc as the coding platform. This allows me to see the user code and help him/her along the way if they get stuck on something.
What else could we be using here?
I'm currently against giving the user "homework" but I'm willing to be swayed if someone can come up with a convincing reason...
Is there a better way to determine basic coding ability during a phone screen?