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When Hiring Engineers, I Always Offer Take-Home Projects Over Whiteboard Sessions
Another golden piece of advice for recruiting software engineers
I’ve never met a single person who is a fan of the whiteboard coding interview. Even with over a decade of programming experience, I can’t always code on a blank whiteboard (or even on a computer) without referencing something. Brainstorming on a whiteboard is fine — but actually writing code is hard.
When hiring someone, I don’t like putting people on the spot with live coding either. You can tell that people typically dislike it, and it makes the applicant nervous, which makes the interview more awkward all around.
However, when you’re hiring an engineer, you do need to get an idea of their coding ability, which is why I like to offer take-home projects instead.
Project Structure
Depending on the position that you’re hiring for, you can structure a take-home coding project in a couple of different ways, but it is important to keep in mind that you do not want this to be a major project. This should be something that can be completed in 4 hours or less. You don’t want to make the applicant spend a bunch of time on this (for free, when they may be applying to multiple jobs), and as a…
