Only that every process sucks.

haha true

Honestly, the best process I’ve heard of is paired programming with the candidate. Whiteboard exercises don’t reflect anything related to how work is actually done.

This of course is in addition to figuring out how they would be as a teammate.

yep, that's the approach i prefer and would be what i'd do if it were my choice. my leadership insists on having folks take a test on codesignal and won't talk to them if they don't do well enough on that platform, though. most of the really great candidates don't even bother taking it

Ah, optimizing for lazy management.

I did one where they gave me a week, a problem to solve and a slack channel for help. I loved it

Now that seems novel. I'd love to hear more 😄

was it like a canned programming problem or more of a "fix this bug" or "implement this feature" kind of problem?

i learned a lot

wow, this is really awesome, thank you!

and so did they

did you chat in a channel that was just yourself and a couple of their engineers?

yea

i was posting updates as i went

then i had the pipeline update the channel

gotcha, did they make you pay for the cluster you deployed to?

yea

lol

that was part of the lesson i learned 🙂

I also deployed to my rasperry pi cluster

I turned this into a learning exercise at my old company

a few people did it as well

the pi cluster was smart. i'm assuming that was so you could test more cheaply?

yea - plus it helped me understand the differences deploying to diff targets

yeah this is really cool. from a hiring manager perspective, you're getting a pretty good approximation of what it's actually like to work with someone, and the time investment from your own developers seems like it would be much lower. eliminates a lot of scheduling problems as well

exactly - eliminates guesswork

how much of a time commitment was it from your end as the interviewee?

I put a lot of time into it, probably 20 hours all told

it could have been less, but I was having fun

cool, yeah thanks again for sharing this 🙂

sure

are you cool if i share that pdf with others?

Sure