* Yossi Kreinin <yossi.krei...@mobileye.com> [2007-06-14 09:55]: > As to your other message, about writing code before the > interview - sure, every good candidate should be able to do it. > I'm only saying I don't like the idea of making writing code > outside of one's job a precondition for an interview.
Nowhere did I say that writing code outside of the job should be a precondition. What I said is merely that candidates should bring some non-trivial piece of code along to discuss. It doesn't matter whether they've written the code specifically for the interview or for their own use or for an open source project or even for a past employer (as long as they have permission to show it, natch). A surprising number of applicants can't actually program, so you want to weed them out early by asking for direct proof that they can do so. However, you also want to avoid the testing situation bias, so I wouldn't to sit them down with a moronic coding test (like that "FizzBuzz" silliness) during the interview, either. The point of asking to see code is to weed out the incompetents; the point of asking them to talk about is to weed out any liars who may have brought code they pulled up with Google. In short: show me you can program. At all. That is all. (I actually lost this point a bit myself during the discussion.) That this sort of question gives you plenty of opportunities to pick the candidate's brain is a nice fringe benefit, but not its main purpose. Note that (obviously, I had hoped) whether they can write code at all wouldn't be the sole criterion for an offer -- in fact it's nothing more than a litmus test. So the nasty false positives you mentioned don't really come up. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
