Are you using Coding Interviews for Senior Software Developers?

Please Don’t… What you should be doing instead.

Kendra Curtis
Geek Culture

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Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash

The market for hiring tech workers, especially Software Engineering, is extremely tight right now. Current estimates of the unemployment rates for tech workers are about 1.7%. It is a good time to talk about interview practices, in particular when hiring Senior Engineers. I know of several cases where senior engineers have declined to interview or decided to explore other opportunities because of code interviews.

It has become standard practice to give technical interviews where a candidate is asked to write code. It is commonplace at most tech companies both large (Google, Facebook, Apple…) and small (Cockroach Labs when it was 50 people). This may seem like the industry standard for interviewing candidates of all levels and something you should be doing as well. Please don’t… I argue, along with some others, it is broken. In the case of senior engineers, it is not a good indicator of their performance or a measure of the day-to-day work expected from a senior member of the team.

Why do Hiring Managers use coding interviews:

  • standard bank of questions with known answers
  • the format reduces variation among interviewers and teams

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