You can lead an engineer to a whiteboard
True story.
At a previous job, I did a lot of interviews. We asked candidates to write mostly-syntactically-correct code on the white board to solve simple problems. This was a way of weeding out people who couldn't code. It was important to us.
There was once a candidate who did extremely well on his phone interview. He seemed like he'd be an easy hire. Let's call him John (not his real name). John was scheduled for 4 one-hour technical interviews back-to-back (this is normal). I was first.
After the initial small-talk, I described a programming problem and asked John to solve it on the white board.
He talked about the problem. He explained where the difficulties lay, and how he would overcome them. He told me about some ways in which the problem could apply in the real world. But he didn't get up.
I told him this was great, and asked him to write it out in code.
John got up and went to the white board. He took a marker and started writing. However, he didn't write code -- he wrote aspects of how he would solve the problem, in English. It wasn't even pseudo-code. It was intelligent and thought-through, but not what I was looking for.
I was unable to persuade him further without being rude.
Between interviews, the interviewers on the schedule would huddle briefly to discuss. The discussion went something like this:
Phone Interviewer: How'd he do?
Me: I'm not sure.
Phone Interviewer: Really? He was awesome on the phone.
Me: He seems very good, but I couldn't get him to write any code. Try to do that.
Interviewer 2: Sure, will do.
But the second interviewer had no more luck than I. The same with the third. By this point, the situation was becoming amusing. The fourth interviewer swore he would not come out without having gotten some kind of code out of John. He, too, failed.
We didn't hire John. Maybe he was a great engineer. Maybe he was playing a joke on us. Maybe he really didn't know how to code. We'll never know.
A lot of life is like this.
At a previous job, I did a lot of interviews. We asked candidates to write mostly-syntactically-correct code on the white board to solve simple problems. This was a way of weeding out people who couldn't code. It was important to us.
There was once a candidate who did extremely well on his phone interview. He seemed like he'd be an easy hire. Let's call him John (not his real name). John was scheduled for 4 one-hour technical interviews back-to-back (this is normal). I was first.
After the initial small-talk, I described a programming problem and asked John to solve it on the white board.
He talked about the problem. He explained where the difficulties lay, and how he would overcome them. He told me about some ways in which the problem could apply in the real world. But he didn't get up.
I told him this was great, and asked him to write it out in code.
John got up and went to the white board. He took a marker and started writing. However, he didn't write code -- he wrote aspects of how he would solve the problem, in English. It wasn't even pseudo-code. It was intelligent and thought-through, but not what I was looking for.
I was unable to persuade him further without being rude.
Between interviews, the interviewers on the schedule would huddle briefly to discuss. The discussion went something like this:
Phone Interviewer: How'd he do?
Me: I'm not sure.
Phone Interviewer: Really? He was awesome on the phone.
Me: He seems very good, but I couldn't get him to write any code. Try to do that.
Interviewer 2: Sure, will do.
But the second interviewer had no more luck than I. The same with the third. By this point, the situation was becoming amusing. The fourth interviewer swore he would not come out without having gotten some kind of code out of John. He, too, failed.
We didn't hire John. Maybe he was a great engineer. Maybe he was playing a joke on us. Maybe he really didn't know how to code. We'll never know.
A lot of life is like this.