Enough with the Programming Puzzles
If you want to find out if a programmer can actually do the job, then it seems to me that the way forward is to have them do something that actually resembles the job.<p>In the high-end cooking world, it&#x27;s not uncommon to do one of two things when looking to hire a new cook:<p>1) Make me a dish. Present the chef with the kitchen, and possibly a specific main ingredient(s), and have them make the best dish they can with that ingredient. Sometimes this is also under some kind of time constraint, to test pressure under fire, but doesn&#x27;t have to be (great chefs might take weeks to develop a new recipe after all).<p>2) The &quot;stage&quot;. The kitchen takes on the chef temporarily for a short period, where they will actually work on different portions of the line, so that the employer can see both how they perform in real time and where their strengths lie. This can be as little as a single shift, or up to a month or more at some very, very high end kitchens like Thomas Keller&#x27;s. Crucially as well, this is generally <i>paid</i> (it&#x27;d actually be illegal otherwise), so the prospective hiree can actually afford to dedicate that kind of time.<p>Now some of this is similar to stuff that some tech companies do already. But I think they often miss crucial elements that makes this actually work in a way that&#x27;s not painful for both parties.<p>The &quot;make me a dish&quot; method for instance, superficially resembles the infamous &quot;sit down at our computer and code a thing&quot; tests I&#x27;ve read of many times. But there are key differences. Tooling is a pain point in programming that doesn&#x27;t so much exist in cooking (in fact part of this test can be making sure the prospective cook is familiar with all the basic tools). Sitting in at a foreign editor&#x2F;IDE&#x2F;language etc. is likely to be more stressful than is really accurate to how one can expect a new coder to perform in the real world. The simple solution is &quot;bring your own knives.&quot; Let the coder use their own machine, or at least give them time to set up a basic version of their favorite tools.<p>The other thing about &quot;make me a dish&quot; that&#x27;s missing from programming equivalents that is I think most important is <i>creativity</i>. &quot;Make me a dish&quot; isn&#x27;t about just proving you can cook, it&#x27;s about proving you can <i>create</i>. And isn&#x27;t that something we want from great programmers as well? Generally when I see and read about these tasks their very proscribed: there&#x27;s a specific spec&#x2F;demand&#x2F;puzzle, and often with the expectation it will be solved in a particular way. One test task I was given once actually even specified what data format I was supposed to use to communicate between back and front ends. What about a mini-hackathon&#x2F;jam approach instead? Give me a subject or a data source and a bit of time, and see what I can come with?<p>The &quot;stage&quot; as well is something I think is underconsidered with tech companies. Companies spend thousands of dollars on hiring practices and recruiters and advertising, but they can&#x27;t just do a paid trial period instead? It makes no sense. If you think you&#x27;ve got a promising candidate, just take them on for a couple weeks, point them at a relatively low-hanging fruit task on the issues board, and see how they do.<p>Alternately, maybe just accept a fucking risk now and again. If the candidate seems to know what they&#x27;re talking about in the interview, maybe just hire the fucking person, and if they suck, fire them. This is the same stricture and risk 90% of hiring practices are under, and somehow the economy hasn&#x27;t collapsed yet so I am gonna tentatively suggest it seems to work.<p>Sometimes the path of least resistance is the easier, cheaper way.