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Comment by CoastalCoder | Hacker News Reader

> I have empathy for the false negatives. I have been them, or maybe at times I'm simply a false positive, the problem is those people are likely to freeze no matter the interview.

I can't speak to the statistical claim that "those people are more likely to freeze no matter the interview."

But just my personal anecdote: I do fine on take-home coding tests, but I freeze up on live-coding tests.

This is one reason I'm vexed by the allegedly common cheating in take-home coding tests. It makes employers suspicious of the testing style that I'm best at.

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I've actually had people cheat on live coding sessions.

For north of $2m over your career, cheating probably is the smart thing to do, especially for a borderline candidate, as there's a fair amount of evidence that the prestige on your CV will make things easier going forward.

However, my problem with take homes was never that the candidate would cheat, but rather they'll probably spend way more time than the 2 hours allocated.

I'm actually less worried about the candidate doing that, than I'm worried that the interviewer bakes in a bunch of assumptions like having a machine setup to do the task, having the specific domain knowledge and experience, and then accidentally trolls the candidate with little to no avenue for feedback.

> I've actually had people cheat on live coding sessions.

What tipped you off?

Also, I'm curious: do you think having them discuss their solution in depth would have been a good countermeasure?

I mean it was pretty obvious with their eyes darting then several lines of code appearing in the code editor.

Of course, this doesn't mean I've discovered 100% of the cheaters, just the obvious ones.

> Also, I'm curious: do you think having them discuss their solution in depth would have been a good countermeasure?

To some degree. But not everyone communicates as well as they code or vice versa, and then it comes to what you're trying to qualify.

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