Awhile back I brought in two candidates for an interview. One candidate's resume had experience going back to the early 90s, programming games on the original Game Boy in assembly, and pretty much every platform after that. Lots of senior developer titles, lots of products to his name.
The other candidate had graduated a couple of years ago from a game programming school, and worked on a couple of miserable movie tie in games.
I was looking forward to the first candidate for weeks, I thought about not even calling in the second candidate, but opted to anyway "because why not".
So I get to the interviewing part of things. "Heya, we are doing embedded development here, so we have to do a lot of basic things like data structures on our own. Here is a binary search tree, can you give me the code to walk it in order?"
15 minutes later, not a line of code. OK, so, instead, walk a link list. Nope, the rest of the hour went by and he wrote a sum total of 1 IF statement, and it was wrong.
Candidate B? Holy shit. So the walking a BST took less than 5 minutes, he did Find First Cousin in a tree in another 5 or so, he then spent 15 minutes implementing a bit packed RLE system, and another 15 minutes doing some other random crazy crap I asked him to do.
He blew through all my interview questions in under an hour.
Unless I have some assurances that a candidate actually wrote the code on the projects on his or her resume, I am going to demand that the candidate write some bloody code on a board.
Not being able to walk a linked list sounds pretty dire. Is it possible that candidate A hadn't written tree-walking code recently? Did he have access to reference materials?
I aced my CS degree, but a few years later, after endless CRUD, I was given a task at work which involved constructing and analyzing hierarchical data. After realizing that it would be modelled with a tree, and a few minutes with my textbook and it all came back to me. If I had been given the same task in an interview, I may well have flunked it.
I personally allow candidates access to Google and whatever else they need on programming tests. That's how they'd solve problems in real life, so why make them relive their final college exams in an interview?
Awhile back I brought in two candidates for an interview. One candidate's resume had experience going back to the early 90s, programming games on the original Game Boy in assembly, and pretty much every platform after that. Lots of senior developer titles, lots of products to his name.
The other candidate had graduated a couple of years ago from a game programming school, and worked on a couple of miserable movie tie in games.
I was looking forward to the first candidate for weeks, I thought about not even calling in the second candidate, but opted to anyway "because why not".
So I get to the interviewing part of things. "Heya, we are doing embedded development here, so we have to do a lot of basic things like data structures on our own. Here is a binary search tree, can you give me the code to walk it in order?"
15 minutes later, not a line of code. OK, so, instead, walk a link list. Nope, the rest of the hour went by and he wrote a sum total of 1 IF statement, and it was wrong.
Candidate B? Holy shit. So the walking a BST took less than 5 minutes, he did Find First Cousin in a tree in another 5 or so, he then spent 15 minutes implementing a bit packed RLE system, and another 15 minutes doing some other random crazy crap I asked him to do.
He blew through all my interview questions in under an hour.
Unless I have some assurances that a candidate actually wrote the code on the projects on his or her resume, I am going to demand that the candidate write some bloody code on a board.