Readit Newspelcg commented on Live coding interviews measure stress, not coding skills hadid.dev/posts/living-co... · Posted by u/mustaphah
As with everything, it depends. Live coding interviews work. They’re not the best candidate experience, but they work at Meta, Google scale, minimizing false positives better than most other formats. What makes them stressful is the lack of interviewer training and the abstract, puzzle-like nature of the problems, which you can really only solve if you’ve spent time studying (e.g., LeetCode) or you’re fresh out of college or academia.
I’ve worked in the assessment space for 6 years and have seen many hiring processes, from Fortune 10 companies to startups hiring their first engineers. The range of signal required, "how much time can my engineering team spend with a candidate", and how much candidate experience you can get away with, is huge. I’ve also been a candidate myself and failed many live coding interviews. It made me feel terrible about myself. The last time for a role at Ycombinator (the interviewer was super nice).
When I work on my product, I try to view it through the lens of empowering candidates to show their skills and potential. I encourage our customers to use assessments that somewhat resemble on-the-job skills. I don’t like the phrasing “real work” anymore. An assessment shouldn’t be unpaid labor, it should be a way for candidates to demonstrate that they can do the job and handle future work thrown at them, and for hiring managers to feel confident extending what are often very high salaries in tech.
With AI, unfortunately, short take-homes (what I prefer as a candidate, using my own tools and editor) are becoming harder to maintain as a fair signal due to AI assistance. I’ve seen companies move back to onsite, and competitors deploy all kinds of proctoring and invasive monitoring.
The perfect solution, in my view, would be an assessment where the candidate feels relaxed and able to perform at their best, with their own editor and configuration, knowing that every other candidate in the pool has the same constraints in terms of time and tooling. It’s a tough problem to solve. I think about it daily and have not come up with a solution.
> As with everything, it depends. Live coding interviews work. They’re not the best candidate experience, but they work at Meta, Google scale, minimizing false positives better than most other formats. What makes them stressful is the lack of interviewer training and the abstract, puzzle-like nature of the problems, which you can really only solve if you’ve spent time studying (e.g., LeetCode) or you’re fresh out of college or academia.
They work (for some) and leet-code weeds out the frauds that really cannot problem solve and assesses those who have not built anything to show to justify not doing it and can be applied to companies that are joining from an acquisition.
> The perfect solution, in my view, would be an assessment where the candidate feels relaxed and able to perform at their best, knowing that every other candidate in the pool has the same constraints in terms of time and tooling. It’s a tough problem to solve.
And that would be the fairest one which is to do the leetcode interview in person on a projected whiteboard and pair programming with the interviewer.
Very relaxing.
pelcg commented on AccuWeather to discontinue free access to Core Weather API developer.accuweather.com... · Posted by u/TerribleTurnout
> Important update
Any title that starts with that is never a good update.
> That rules it out of any production deployment until 2026 so.
Has that stopped everyone before? Java, C#/.NET, Swift and probably more started out as closed-source languages/platforms, yet seemed to have been deployed to production environments before their eventual open-sourcing.
Many developers had no problem using .NET and C# in production despite them starting out as closed-source for years.
pelcg commented on UK becomes fastest-growing G7 economy apnews.com/article/uk-eco... · Posted by u/geox
What does this mean for UK businesses and startups, is it still a great place to start a company or would the US be better as a european founder?
pelcg commented on Show HN: I built an animated 3D bookshelf for ebooks github.com/mawise/bookshe... · Posted by u/mawise
Not a bookshelf, but it reminds me of something that Stripe did something similar here which is equally as cool.
Why do you think that famous employees get straight offers without doing anything verses many engineers still getting leetcoded and get left with no offer despite being over-qualified?
Soham was able to pass most programming assessments so well, the folks at bookface were discussing to ban him from applying to their startups.
You can see that another system has been created to make sure that the role is reserved for friends of the founder, ex-collegues of another team over an extremely qualified engineer out of no where.