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Comment by CriticalSection | Hacker News Reader

I agree. Phone tech interviews are usually low level screens to see if the candidate has the minimum technical chops to come on board. Short and sweet is what I prefer, especially since I'm usually doing the phone interview on a lunch break and would like to have some time to actually wolf down my lunch.

Collaborative code editors are an unpleasant modern addition to the interview process. Plus I'm usually writing the code in another window before transcribing it to the collaborative window, usually leaving the person on the other end of the call to wonder if I disappeared. I tend to pass these things though.

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"I'm usually writing the code in another window before transcribing it to the collaborative window"

Speaking from the other end of the phonescreen line and collab editing session, that behavior looks a lot like googling and pasting in the first answer you find on stackoverflow. We use a collaborative environment because I kind of want to see you typing, sorry. I know, it's degrading, but... it's a screen, it's not designed to find out how great you are, just prove you're not going to waste our time.

Demonstrates why it is a crap way of testing people. (I often look up answers on Stack Overflow to save time/ thinking. I also answer a fair few questions on Stack overflow as well).

I agree. This comment reveals a complete disconnect between how this interviewer thinks developers work, and how they _actually_ work.

Uh, yeah, that's some bullshit, buddy. You know what we're doing? Constructing and testing our code! A lot of those collaborative editors lack the ability to run code, which makes them only good for displaying final results. Plus, we all have editors we're familiar and productive using, why wouldn't we use what works for us? Plus, copying and pasting in from Stack Overflow is an issue? Come ON, buddy, that's just a sign of a good developer. A good developer does as little reinventing of the wheel as possible. If you want to make things more challenging then just increase the difficulty level of your questions so that more Stack Overflow code will need to be found and cobbled together. But yeah, if I got shit for not literally typing live into the crappy cooperative code editor, I'd politely thank you for the opportunity and end the interview. Senior-level people don't have a lot of patience for that kind of crap, particularly the truly good senior people.

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