Having them do a code review (about 10-15 minutes), i.e. have a short (about 50-80 lines) piece of real code, that I have prepared with plenty of problem, messes, non-idiomatic code, or little ugly things.
NOT a test as in "find the 10 hidden mistakes", but an invitation to talk about ways to improve the code. I make it clear to the candidate that it's not about the syntax, or any algorithm, but about quality.
It's really good to see what kinds of things they care about (e.g. do they look into low-level performance, or more into things like variable naming and method length), how deep their knowledge of the language is (e.g. do they recognize non-idiomatic code, and suggest more modern approaches), if they are more of a high-level thinker or more detail-oriented etc. And of course, it nicely weeds out the (surprisingly high) number of people who cannot really program, without relying on any memorization of keywords. Plus, it's pretty realistic - nobody ever writes code on a whiteboard, but doing code reviews of code somebody else wrote is something that happens all the time.
Most candidates find that task quite fun - and with really good candidates I quite frequently learn something new myself.
I was planning to do a blog post about why and how I do that review - let me know if that would be of interest to you.
I would love to be asked to do a code review during the interview process. What a great idea.
I can imagine that another good thing about it is that it takes enough focus and is a familiar enough task that even if I’m in nervous-applicant mode, it will kick me over into acting like I’m already working there.
NOT a test as in "find the 10 hidden mistakes", but an invitation to talk about ways to improve the code. I make it clear to the candidate that it's not about the syntax, or any algorithm, but about quality.
It's really good to see what kinds of things they care about (e.g. do they look into low-level performance, or more into things like variable naming and method length), how deep their knowledge of the language is (e.g. do they recognize non-idiomatic code, and suggest more modern approaches), if they are more of a high-level thinker or more detail-oriented etc. And of course, it nicely weeds out the (surprisingly high) number of people who cannot really program, without relying on any memorization of keywords. Plus, it's pretty realistic - nobody ever writes code on a whiteboard, but doing code reviews of code somebody else wrote is something that happens all the time.
Most candidates find that task quite fun - and with really good candidates I quite frequently learn something new myself.
I was planning to do a blog post about why and how I do that review - let me know if that would be of interest to you.