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Comment by lr4444lr | Hacker News Reader

How much time do you allot for this thing? Cloning the repo, dependency installs, server/DB setups, possible build steps, configuring the IDE to the project ... even if the whole thing is containerized, just going from nothing to running code in an IDE alone could be expected to take 20-30 minutes of the interview.

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You just need to rewrite the dev tools in rust!

Joking aside, modern fast tools like bun can make this type of interview way more viable.

I once conducted this type of interview where the candidate had to install node on their windows laptop and... we spent most of the time debugging their install :/

FYI just small tip on the Windows / Node front, you should just install & use NVM instead of Node directly - will make many headaches go away.

In my experience doing these interviews in Node and Python, it takes about 5 minutes to get running. If it takes more than that... maybe use a different codebase.

What exactly is the interviewer looking for? Familiarity with tools, or actually debugging skill? I like the idea of debugging questions, I'm just not convinced all this setup and "use your own tooling" is necessary,and that a long enough snippet of given whiteboard code sample can morr effciently test for debugging skill. I can always teach (and learn!) new tools, and frankly, there is value to me as an interviewer to see someone manage without his tools.

Agree! This is one of the core pains we set out to fix. Using a CDE to package everything nicely for the candidate goes a surprisingly long way for their experience.

I think there's a valid point that any IDE != a candidate's local setup. But I think there's a compromise there - we try to offer a variety of common IDE's + a few mins of prep to download extensions, etc before you're thrown in the thick of it.

The bugs are chosen in projects that don't require this much setup. (There is no server/database, they use standard tools for the given language, and they are generally solvable without needing an elaborate IDE/debugger setup. Of course that may help, and it's why you bring your own computer and choose the language ahead of time.)

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