Picking problems for programming interviews - Will Larson

This resource first appeared in issue #22 on 01 May 2020 and has tags Technical Leadership: Software Development, Hiring: Other, Hiring: Interviewing and Evaluating

Picking problems for programming interviews - Will Larson

If you do do coding as part of your interviews, it’s tough to find something that is relevant, hard enough to successfully distinguish between candidates, but easy enough to be doable. Here Larson plays with a few examples (one of which is a particular kind of data munging: something broadly relevant to our needs). His suggestions are to aim for problems that:

  • Support simple initial solutions and compounding requirements
  • Are solvable with a few dozen lines of code
  • Require algorithmic thinking but not knowing a specific algorithm
  • Don’t require juggling numerous variables in your head
  • Does support debugging and evolving the code
  • Are not domain specific to [unjustly: LJD] advantage arbitrary experience
  • Require writing actual code in language of their choice
  • Are done in a real code editor
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