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Do you let candidates noodle, on their own, for those three hours?

Worst part of programmer interviews are coding as performance art.

I don't code "out loud". I kind of get lost inside my own head. I can explain myself after I figure something out, not during. If I'm supposed to talk, then I'm thinking about talking, not programming.

Obviously: I've never liked pair programming. Rubber ducking has never worked for me.



We let the candidate do whatever they'd like during the interview. Some liked to talk out loud, and others preferred not to. We didn't care.

Also — we gave candidates one hour (the author of the blog post does not seem to remember that detail).


I remember being taught pair programming in school and thinking "This is awful". I just can't see how it's supposed to actually work.

Rubbing ducking works, but only has a debugging measure. Explaining what your code is actually doing on a line-by-line basis can sus out the root cause of a bug.

I suppose that's the only time pair programming could work for me; by explaining what each line of code does, another programmer could stop me and tell me "No, that's not right".


Oh. You reminded me: I quite like pair (group) debugging. It's like shared adventure with a prize at the end.




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