Random thoughts on coding interview

An idea to do coding interview more effectively

A major complaint we have as an industry is LeetCode style coding interview, people hates it, and some claims its not effective and generate too much false negatives.

I thought a random idea to make it more useful.

The idea is to setup a leetcode style coding challenge, and provide multiple choices of solutions written in English (or whatever language of your choice). We then let the candidate to choose the right solution, and implement it in their programming language of choice.

Once completed, interviewer can discuss the solution with the candidate.

There are a few things we can tweak:

1. Obviously we can choose question that fit the domain of the role
2. The choices, we should consider mixing correct and incorrect answer, optimal and non-optimal answer
3. We can also choose the timing to present these options, maybe we let the candidate to try for the 1st 10 mins, then provide these options to help them
4. You can also throw in code solution into the mix, if you want to assess candidate’s ability to read such code.

More often than not, a software engineer’s job is not to design novel algorithm but to understand existing algorithm, reason about it. Sometimes, we might also need to read some poorly written papers, understand it and codify the approach in our solution. So I think this approach will provide a better Signal/Noise ratio.

I won’t be going into the pros and cons of coding interview, the fact is many companies rely on them, and making it more useful should be a net-win.

Thanks for reading!