this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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Programming
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I disagree. I give live coding tests. I very much don’t want the candidate to be stressed. I provide a written and verbal description of the (simple) problem, and provide unit tests. And I talk them through it if they run into problems, but try to give them space to work it out.
I’m not sadistic. I want to see if they can write code.
The few times I skipped the live test because of practical reasons or they were “too senior” I absolutely regretted it.
Interesting. What do you think happened with those you didn't test? You think they were making stuff up or senior at their job is a far cry from senior at your job?
Not sure. One seemed either incredibly timid or just way in above his head on simple tasks. I assigned him a bug and had already narrowed it down to a particular return code, in a particular call tree. He could have set 20 breakpoints and found the bug in five minutes. Or put unique error codes and found the bug in ten minutes.
But weeks later he was still asking questions and eventually just moved on without solving the bug or even finding the cause.
Maaaybe he would have aced the live coding test, but I doubt it. He just never seemed to "get it" and I think the live test would have reflected it.
But by "senior" i mean decades of experience. No quibbling about job titles.