Hacker News Reader

First of all, the interviewer might not be doing it consciously. Code just looks better in an IDE, the same way a guy in a suit makes a better first impression than a guy with sneakers and ripped jeans who smells like pee.

But that said, if you were interviewing someone and they did all of their algorithmic boxes and lines on the whiteboard but switched to the laptop to write the code, would you ding them for that?

View on HN

Beats me. I've never worked at a company that would allow a candidate to fire up a laptop during an interview.

I was once asked to set up the interviewers laptop.

When I used to interview contractors (more leeway in the interview process) I would put them in front of a computer with Visual Studio and a web browser, because that's how people actually work. I didn't get enough samples to tell if success at that correlates to success on the job, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com