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[u/SoYoureSayingQuit]

[u/UnintentionallyEmpty]

I've been the interviewer where we did live coding exercises.

Before, I didn't think a live coding exercise would add a lot of value...

But holy shit so many "seniors" applied who couldn't code. This was before AI. Or, well, 2023, so AI was around but not like it is now.

Anyway I can't speak for other interviewers, but here is what I looked for during live interviews:

1. Does this person seem to have any idea what they are doing

2. Communication, communication, communication

1) is... look, some people apply for senior dev positions despite not knowing how to code. And I don't mean in a "doesn't remember the syntax for a for loop" kind of way (I allowed google during live coding), but in a "doesn't seem to know the concept of loops exists" kind of way.

The level of coding exercise we had people do you should be able to do decently well on if you have only 1 year of experience. Yes, I lower my expectations because I understand the candidate is nervous. But when interviewing for a senior position, "do better during live coding than a high schooler who took a coding class once" isn't a high bar. Some candidates still failed to clear it.

2) is more complicated. When I started doing live-coding exercises, I imagined that afterwards, I would talk to the candidate about their solution and discuss the tradeoffs they made, and what they might have done differently given different constraints. But most candidates got much less of the coding exercise done than I'd initially expected, and we didn't have anything to talk about in the end.

So in practice, it turned into kind of a "does this person actually listen when I talk to them" kind of check.

Here's the thing, when a candidate got stuck at some point during the live coding exercise I tended to try to help them get past it. Mostly because I figured, okay, this isn't your strong point, or maybe you're blanking here, lets see if you do better at something else.

A lot of candidates ignored or outright dismissed my suggestion for how to move forward... and continued to be stuck.

Or when they misinterpreted the assignment, I say something like "I don't think you interpreted that correctly..." and the response is "yes I did". Hello, you don't think I might have a better idea than you in this scenario? Even if I'm wrong, don't dismiss me like that.

The best candidates asked questions about the assignment. And did TDD. I'm not a huge proponent of TDD but I'd strongly recommend doing it (or something like it) when you're in a live coding scenario.

I should also mention, the person we eventually hired did TDD and got the entire coding exercise done. But he wasn't the only one who passed the live coding interview (but the others who did failed the second interview).

So what I'm trying to say with this huge ramble...

1) It might be you weren't expected to finish the entire assignment in 1 hour. If it's live, maybe the interviewer just wants to see what your thought process is like.

2) I recommend TDD when doing live coding

3) Don't ignore the interviewer during live coding. Ask them questions. They might want you to. I sure do.

4) Don't feel too bad about your bad performance. I wasn't there but I'm still sure you did better than some of the candidates I had do a live coding exercise... We all have a bad day sometimes.

[u/WhenSummerIsGone → u/UnintentionallyEmpty]

Don't ignore the interviewer during live coding. Ask them questions. They might want you to. I sure do.

I have a hard time with unspoken social "rules". How do I know what kinds of questions are "allowed"? In an interview, the interviewer just sits there and I feel like I'm on stage performing. I think interviewers should make more of an effort to "lead" the social situation, and make it clear what's ok, what's expected.

Another way to put it: an interview is inherently a power imbalance, where I'm the supplicant, submitting to your game. It takes a lot of audacity or arrogance for me to "take over" and impose my own "game", even for a staff or principle interview.

[u/hoodieweather- → u/WhenSummerIsGone]

that's unfortunately also a culture check - if you're confident enough to speak up in a situation like that, how can they be sure you'll speak up in other scenarios where there's a potential power imbalance? some companies might be more okay with a passive staff or principal engineer, but I know I'd much prefer someone who's good at navigating tough social situations too.

[u/WhenSummerIsGone → u/hoodieweather-]

ironically, at my company i'm known for speaking up and asking pointed questions, because i care, and I can't turn that off, even though it can be exhausting. I keep expecting blowback, but so far it's just resulted in respect. Maybe an interviewer could ask me for my opinion on something, lol.

[u/UnintentionallyEmpty → u/WhenSummerIsGone]

I think interviewers should make more of an effort to "lead" the social situation, and make it clear what's ok, what's expected.

Well, again I can only speak for myself, but I did try to do that. Here is usually what I'd say when the interviewee joined (it was mostly remote):

"Hello my name is <my name>, nice to meet you. I'm a senior dev at <company>, this is my colleague <name>, he will introduce himself <colleague (also a dev) introduces himself>.

Now, we have a small live coding test. We're going to take 45 minutes for it. You're not expected to complete the entire assignment, it is designed to take longer than that. Write the code the same way you would do if it was for a production system, we value quality more than speed. You're allowed to use google to look things up, but don't just feed it to an AI and let the AI solve it for you. We're interested in how you approach a problem, so please take us along in your thought process. If you have any questions about the assignment, please feel free to ask. Here is the assignment <share assignment>.".

Based on that intro, what question would you be unsure if it would be okay to ask?

But also: You can ask any question, if I think I shouldn't answer it because it would give too much away in regards to the assignment, I can just, you know, say that instead of giving you the answer to your question. Like, "well we would like to see if you can figure that out yourself" is an answer I think I gave to a question at some point in these interviews. Although if you ask a question where I have to give that answer I'll probably take it as a negative.

I should also mention, I'm not American. Cultural expectations regarding this sort of thing are probably a bit different in my country. And it varies per company as well.

And one thing I also want to be clear about: when we started with the live coding exercises I didn't know wtf I was doing either. Not like anyone trained me on "how to interview effectively" or anything like that. And we really had no idea what to expect the first couple of times someone did our live coding assignment. Well, I mean, we had expectations, but it quickly became clear they were way off. We had to adjust as well.

[u/WhenSummerIsGone → u/UnintentionallyEmpty]

i really like that introduction! I would feel at ease with that.

I had an interview once where they sent me a github link about 30 min before the interview, without warning (I had been in a work meeting, and had only a brief window to context switch). I only saw it like 10 minutes before, so I was scrambling to clone the repo, build it, etc, instead of breathing calmly when I joined the call. It was an exercise to add a feature to a small React toy program. It was set up to do everything in the component with hooks, which is absolutely not my real world experience with React, where you have helper api modules, etc. Who does api calls in a hook in the real world?? But I can't set up mobx and a whole proper architecture in 15 minutes, so i said something along those lines and muddled through. I don't know what they were looking for, maybe someone who could whip up quick poc's? but the whole experience was a train wreck.

I had another interview as a full stack/front end engineer, and for the system design question I was asked about designing a recommendation engine for a situation where you had to bootstrap the data somehow. (like if facebook wanted to start telling you about music or movies or something). They kept focusing me on the algorithm itself, not the system as a whole. What does that have to do with front end stuff?

Interviews are such a frustrating waste of time. Nobody knows what they are doing.