Hello Elphers!
I’m working on designing an interview process to hire a senior software engineer for a 20ish person startup and I’m debating which of the following we should use as a technical screener right before the on-site:
- Take-home coding assessment (~two hr challenge), or
- One hour code pairing session with another senior developer on the team
I’d love to know your thoughts on which to select and what you’ve seen done in thoughtfully crafted and effective interview processes. Some thoughts that have crossed my mind on these two options:
Take-home coding assessment
Pros 😄
- Allows some candidates more comfort
- Ability to go deeper into problems
- More opportunities for the candidate to propose creative solutions
Cons 🙈
- May give the impression that we want the candidates to do free work
- Difficulty in preventing candidates from spending more time on the project
- Difficult to monitor the integrity of the assignment
- Difficult to judge submissions equally if we don’t enforce a time restraint
- Overall more time is required from the candidate. This may not make the process equitable for time-constrained candidates (i.e. parents)
- Requires a separate regroup to ask follow-up questions and probe the candidate's decisions
Technical code pairing sessionPros 😄
- Allows us to more closely replicate what working with engineers on the job will be like
- Less time required from the candidate
- The candidate gets more live-time with other members of the team
- Easier to enforce consistency in how candidates are evaluated
Cons 🙈
- Less depth in the topic covered
- Live pairing sessions can be stressful
- More time (per interview) needed from the engineering team
What are your thoughts?
I appreciate you ❤️
