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Interviewing Articles

Interviewing

Our Guide to Creating Language-Agnostic Programming Interview Questions

Our customers regularly ask us about the best way to tell if candidates will be able to perform well on their engineering teams. One of the best pieces of advice we give when asked this question is: make your question more about business practices and less about skills with specific programming languages. When you’re measuring their ability to answer a business case rather than something they could simply Google, you’re getting a better measure of their actual success on the job.

Interviewing

The #1 Best Anti-Cheat Interview Question Ever

It’s inevitable. You interview 23 developers to fill a junior role, and you notice more than one of them pasting not-insignificant amounts of code during their technical interview. At some point during the months-long interview process, one of those candidates posted that question to Glassdoor’s Interview review section, and someone else was smart morally compromised enough to post it on Stack Overflow. Then all it takes is a developer with even a basic amount of Googling or ChatGPT skills to find that question and its answer during the interview and use it for their professional gain.

Engineering Management

Returning to the Office? Don’t Bring These Bad Technical Interview Elements With You

As the pandemic eases up and people start trickling back to offices everywhere, there are benefits to the in-person connections that result: more spontaneous collaboration, good mentoring, and easier relationship building. Plus who doesn’t love a little office cooler time? But as we collectively open the door to some form of office life, let’s not let the bad stuff from before in with us. That means unnecessary commutes, mandated “optional” happy hours, and – most crucially – truly terrible technical interviewing techniques.

Interviewing

Dev Discussions: Eradicating Whiteboard Interviews with Jon Nguyen of NoWhiteBoard.org

Raise your hand if you’ve ever had to do a whiteboard interview for a job. 🤚 Now raise your hand if you like doing whiteboard interviews. … I’ll wait. If you didn’t find your hand waving in the air, you’ll enjoy the insights Jon Nguyen of NoWhiteboard.org provided during his discussion with CoderPad developer advocate Corbin Crutchley. Jon’s website is a goldmine for people fed-up with having to jump through hoops to get a job. It’s a job board for companies that don’t do whiteboard interviews and are transparent about their interview process.

Interviewing

6 Ways Customers Improved Their Technical Interviewing with Playback Mode

Most people can only hold a handful of things in their memory at the same time– famously 7, plus or minus 2 . (Personally, I’m lucky to hit 3). Technical interviewing requires keeping track of dozens of elements, from the logistics of conducting the interview to evaluating the code. You’re likely to lose some important details. That’s why CoderPad created Playback Mode to help you review your candidates’ code submission and rewatch how they arrived at their solution after the interview. Playback improves your ability to review the final code by letting you watch the interview back. You can do so in real time or by jumping to specific moments. (Protip: Playback skips from edit to edit, compressing any “dead” time, in turn saving you time.) This feature is also useful for reviewing an interview someone else conducted.

Interviewing

Improve Front-End Coding Interviews with Mockups

As we’ve talked about before: Interviewing a front-end programming candidate is tough . There are so many niches within the moniker “front-end” that could include anything from managing global state to creating pixel-perfect UI implementations. Regardless of the differences between candidates’ skills, one thing still persists: Their work impacts the user experience. This experience, while powered by code, is driven by the app’s requirements and interactions a user faces.

Interviewing

Leverage Visuals in Back-End Engineering Hiring

The best interviews are subjective and allow a candidate to express their thought process. Whether that’s expressed through their code, comments, or via a conversation in code review, it can give a good insight into how they’ll function within your production codebase. Unfortunately, most instructions provided within an interview – particularly those of back-end engineering – tend to be step-by-step instructions with little room for creative interpretation.

Interviewing

Optimizing Your Technical Interview Process

The key to a successful technical interview process is a keen focus on both the interview team and the candidate experience. As interviewers, you don’t want to waste time interviewing candidates that don’t meet basic technical requirements (after all, there are few things more valuable than your developers’ time). As a company in a competitive hiring environment, delivering an outstanding candidate experience has never been more important. You must sell the candidates on why you’re the right employer for them.

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