Ask HN: How do you conduct coding interviews?
It turns out, the answer to whether someone can do the job you&#x27;ll hire them for is to do a little of the job you&#x27;ll hire them for. (Carpenters don&#x27;t whiteboard bridle joint solutions for cabinetmaking, prospective chefs don&#x27;t solve biochemistry problems, etc).<p>I work for Pivotal. For engineering hiring is done in two parts.<p>The first part is &quot;Rob&#x27;s Pairing Interview&quot;. This is a simple technical screen -- essentially, if you have some programming nous, you will pass. Takes about 30-60 minutes.<p>The second part is to bring you in for a pairing day.<p>In the morning you pair with an engineer on one team. In the afternoon, on a different team. A different group of folk take you to lunch (we try to have a mix of disciplines and divisions for the lunch).<p>When you&#x27;re pairing, you will work on real code, for a real problem. We usually try to put you into two teams with different stacks or problem spaces, ideally matching one of them to something you cite on your résumé and the other one to something you don&#x27;t.<p>I think it works pretty well (obvious bias: I did well enough to get hired). Folk who really don&#x27;t want to pair self-select out, usually even before applying. Everyone I work with is capable and personable, which goes a <i>long</i> way to making it a great place to work.<p>So if you have a way you actually work, see if you can just try that.