(Continued from: "Your Technical Interviews Suck!" )
I get together with a group of engineering leaders regularly, and this topic continues to come up and we roll our eyes and laugh.
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Since 1996, Iβve never found myself in a situation where Iβm working, then suddenly brought before a panel, forced to share my screen, and required to live code random challenges, provided in real time by the panel, to completion.
Zero times, has this scenario ever presented itself to me, nor have I experienced it amongst my teams.
Zero 0οΈβ£
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When you crafted your strategic hiring plan with quantifiable, measurable outcomes, did you actually decide that live coding would reveal an engineer's true potential and reveal their capabilities in a real-world scenario?
I know this is a rhetorical question, because the answer is π§π¨.
βBut we have such a grueling process that has proven to hire the best of the best of the best 10x engineers!β π₯±
Claiming your live coding interviews snagged you top-tier engineers, while dismissing those who stumbled as inferior, is quite the logical fallacy: a hasty generalization or, dare I say, survivorship bias[7]βlike saying a marathon runnerβs no good because they lost a 100-meter sprint, even though you need a marathon runner on your team πββοΈ
Let me help you understand your peers π¨βπ«
MOST
SOFTWARE
ENGINEERS
ARE
INTROVERTS π€―
Studies peg introversion at around nearly 70% among engineers, with ISTJ as a dominant personality type [1, 2, 3, 4]
Another analysis shows ISTJ types thrive in structured, solitary coding tasks [5]
So, let me ask again:
What are the quantifiable, measurable outcomes that live coding, in a job interview, provides?
Many will freeze, as one Reddit user described, βlike a deer in headlightsβ [6].
Want to watch me code live?
I can give you a great summary of this and save you the time:
βJake is now doing lots of thinking, lots of questions, lots of staring at the wall, lots of stackoverflow, lots of looking in books, lots of trying and trying and trying and trying and testing, taking a break and thinking about the problemβ.
βJake is now repeating this processβ.
Ditch live coding, and simply have nothing but a real conversation.
Ask about their past projects, probe their problem-solving process, or give them a take-home assignment to tackle in peace.
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Your job is to uncover talent, not host a coding reality show.
If youβre rejecting candidates because they flopped in your high-pressure stunt, the real failure is your hiring process and the only live performance that failedβ¦ was yours.
Stop. It.
β€οΈ
Jake