Guillermo Antonio Amaral Bastidas wrote:
OT: When I interview somebody for a development job, I show them some code
that contains a few errors and useless bits of code hidden inside. I ask
them to review the code and e-mail me back with details on how the coding
guideline for the company can be improved ( clearly a trap ).
This is counterproductive.
Asking a candidate to provide negative feedback is just a nasty
interview trick.
Candidates who ignore the code are fairly astute. What if the
interviewer wrote the code? How will he react to negative criticism?
What about the policies? Who wrote those? How immutable are those?
Candidates who criticize the code and guidelines without concern are
likely to do so to co-workers and can make a really negative environment.
So, rather than creating a useful question, you have actually managed to
create a *negative* correlation question where you are selecting
*against* the best candidates (good coders who recognize the issues but
also pay attention to the human side of things, too).
You need to be a bit more cognizant of your power over interview
candidates. Keep your questions on neutral political ground to get the
best information from the candidate.
Most developers just submit some wacky guideline improvements ( I discard
them quickly as they did the code ), but a few developers actually spot
the 'trap'; they do so by trying to understand the code.
I personally find that the best solution to this is to ask a candidate,
"Send me 1000 lines of your best code. Any language, any project."
Any decent developer has 1000 lines of some project laying around to
send in. Then I'll ask some questions about it in the interview.
This cleans out people you don't want *very* quickly.
-a
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