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Comment by reddit_clone | Hacker News Reader

I would rather coding interviews went like this.

Give the candidates a non-trivial problem, which might take a few days to complete. Everything documented and checked into github. Call them for interviews and review design/code with them. Make sure it was not all copy-pasta and someone else didn't write it for them.

To make sure of that, introduce a slight variation in spec and ask them to do it on the spot.

This way, you get to review their entire development process, How they approach problems, code quality, unit tests, code performance , usage of source control system, CI/CD usage etc. At this point you will know for sure if you want them or not (They might also know they want to work for you or not .. :-). )

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Sounds like a great way to filter people who have other responsibilities, or are an attractive enough candidate to be busy interviewing for other firms.

Really puts the "free" in freelancer, too.

Absolutely. I second that. I would be willing to spend a couple of hours on an interview task, which could give the interviewer an idea about my skills, but more than that I would see as an overkill. Besides, in my view, showing some OS repos on GitHub can be a good alternative.

This works if you're willing to pay someone a few thousand dollars to do this. If not, the only people that are likely willing to go to this much trouble are new grads and the desperate.

For more experiences/senior developers who already like where they work, it's already pretty difficult for a recruiter to convince them to come in for a full days worth of interviews.

A large employer in my past used to apparently conduct just this sort of "interview". I learned to my disgust a few years later that the division conducting those "interviews" were doing what they called a "brain suck". That is, they never intended to hire anyone, they were just using the unlucky "interviewees" to help them solve a software engineering problem for free.

I second this. I have some anxiety issues and someone looking at me while coding _the whole "answer"_ would be a really horrifying experience.

My anxiety issue has nothing to do with how good I am with coding, it's just about confronting people and socializing with them

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