I keep seeing these posts complaining about the interview process and I'm surprised I haven't yet seen one suggestion for an obvious approach to determining a candidate's technical AND inter-personal skills: i.e. code review.
Why not present a candidate with a PR with some code/style errors etc. and ask them to do a code review. You'll establish their ability to spot issues in code and you'll get an impression of how they communicate with their peers. You'll also get some sense of their professional experience: e.g. if they clearly understand the code-review process; if they can spot things that could cause long-term problems etc.
I wouldn't see lack of code-review experience as being a blocker to hiring someone - they may simply not yet have worked somewhere with established good practice - but I do think it's a way of presenting code 'challenges' that are much closer to real-world scenarios.
Beekey Cheung is a software engineer with a large amount of enthusiasm for economics and a passion for education. He loves mentoring other programmers and is currently building an application to te...
I agree about the need to test technical and inter-personal skills, which is why I described using an open ended architecture/design problem to do so.
I disagree that a code review is as good. Discussing how code should be structured and the trade offs of various decisions is more representative of technical skill than catching style errors.
I don't agree that code review is simply about catching style errors: that's what linters and tools like Prettier automate for you. Amongst other things code review should definitely be looking at how coding decisions conform to architecture/design goals.
We at least both agree that using real-world scenarios is a better approach than personality tests and abstract code problems :)
I interviewed at Slack recently and literally part of the interview was doing a code review. I don't have any insight into how they reviewed it and how it factored into a hiring decision, but I thought it was incredibly smart.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
I keep seeing these posts complaining about the interview process and I'm surprised I haven't yet seen one suggestion for an obvious approach to determining a candidate's technical AND inter-personal skills: i.e. code review.
Why not present a candidate with a PR with some code/style errors etc. and ask them to do a code review. You'll establish their ability to spot issues in code and you'll get an impression of how they communicate with their peers. You'll also get some sense of their professional experience: e.g. if they clearly understand the code-review process; if they can spot things that could cause long-term problems etc.
I wouldn't see lack of code-review experience as being a blocker to hiring someone - they may simply not yet have worked somewhere with established good practice - but I do think it's a way of presenting code 'challenges' that are much closer to real-world scenarios.
I agree about the need to test technical and inter-personal skills, which is why I described using an open ended architecture/design problem to do so.
I disagree that a code review is as good. Discussing how code should be structured and the trade offs of various decisions is more representative of technical skill than catching style errors.
I don't agree that code review is simply about catching style errors: that's what linters and tools like Prettier automate for you. Amongst other things code review should definitely be looking at how coding decisions conform to architecture/design goals.
We at least both agree that using real-world scenarios is a better approach than personality tests and abstract code problems :)
I interviewed at Slack recently and literally part of the interview was doing a code review. I don't have any insight into how they reviewed it and how it factored into a hiring decision, but I thought it was incredibly smart.