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Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

The very premise of an interview is this: I see you're allegedly qualified from your résumé, but I'm skeptical. Prove you are who you say you are. This can be phrased much more tactfully, and it's great if the interviewer does so, but at some deep level every interviewee has to decide if they're comfortable with this dynamic or not. I think a technical question can raise the exact same hackles as requesting code.

If someone isn't comfortable with a complete stranger trying to validate whether they are the person described in the résumé, I suggest that they work hard on their networking so that they are always in a situation where the prospective employer is convinced in advance that they are a good hire.

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Of course, this should also go the other way. As an interviewee, your task is both to prove yourself and to make the interviewers prove that their company is somewhere you want to work. So, ask probing questions about their culture, their code, their processes, their structure, the foundations of their business. And if they don't give good answers, or get upset about the questions, run away.

Absolutely. And I would say the same thing to interviewers: Part of the dynamic is of a candidate being skeptical that the company and the job are as good as they sound, and asking you to prove it. If that rankles an interviewer, seeking candidates through networking where the candidate arrives with a certain realistic view of the prospects is also a good thing.

Or just take your own advice and bring a code portfolio.

Or put some public domain code on github :-)

That might work if the guy interviewing you have seen it, but I just really want to reply to can "can you write a function to traverse a tree" with "yes, on page 3 of the source code to the compiler I implemented in clojure".

I had much the same experience. I was interviewing with Steve Rosenberg at KL Group, and he asked me a question about Java coding. "Here," I said, pulling out a sheaf of papers, "is the source code for a small Scheme interpreter I wrote in Java..."

He waved me off, that was good enough for him. The rest of the interview was then about cultural fit and ability to ship software on time without drama.

(And no, what I wrote is not in the same league as Clojure, much less the same ballpark. But it was good enough to demonstrate some basic understanding of Java and familiarity with undergraduate-level Computer Science.)

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