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Discussion on: Interviews without riddles?

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alanfriedman profile image
Alan Friedman • Edited

Aren't live coding exercises easy to fake too, given that they often involve the same questions (nested loops, matrices, recursion, graph traversal, etc)?

In other words you could (and people do) just learn common coding challenges and ace the test without demonstrating you can do the actual work required at the job (Building user interfaces, migrating DBs, standing up APIs, writing unit tests, etc).

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald

Well, first, that assumes that all live coding exercises are the same, when in fact they aren't.

Second, generally if someone doesn't know how to solve a problem in coding, that will be evident in how they work the problem. We aren't necessarily looking at whether or not you can implement a linked list on a whiteboard, we're looking at how you approach implementing a linked list on a whiteboard. (And, for the record, my own live coding questions are things you definitely can't study for - linked lists is NOT one of them.)

Whether or not the company is using the live coding questions intelligently or not is ultimately their problem, the same as whether they ask stupid Freudian questions like "if you could be an animal, what would you be?" But interviewees don't know what the interviewers are actually looking for. If you were to interview with me, for example, you can bet you'd be doing live coding, but whether or not you knew some arcane or trivial technical algorithm is really the last thing I'm looking for. ;)