Prelude, articles:
Against them https://dev.to/meseta/live-coding-interviews-essential-or-discriminatory-11kd
For them https://www.codewithjason.com/live-coding-interviews/
I have social anxiety I usually make that clear; but you wouldn't know it. I go out and I'm really great with people. I used to waiter and bartend and excel at that.
For me it's debilitating in certain scenarios like unknowns or being watched and evaluated. Once I'm comfortable with a place or people it fades; I love pairing and mentoring. I even makeself give public talks at my previous meetup fullsack_js. When I'm in a safe space the code and conversation will fly from me.
Most recently I accepted a live coding interview because "it's less about the code and more how we work together".... yeah not the case. At this point I've researched and invested my time for 2 previous interviews; a common pattern.
So my brain freezes a bit, I don't catch every optimization and I run out time before say adding tests. But I gel well with the developers testing me we figure out some issues and I display the right attitude of accepting advice and listening to my peers something I didn't do well as a junior. I'm open I'm raw which I value when hiring someone, it's more about someone's Attitude than their Aptitude in my eyes.
So I realise there was a lot of optimisations and practises to iterate on, I got bored waiting for feedback and spent two hours with a clean less stressed mind and implemented them. I mean I went above and beyond. Added PWA support on the fly image format optimisation (AVIF), keyboard monitoring (ESC to go back), cleaned up and reused functions as composables / utils, Prisma schema and auto Zod types generated, even in this case very custom validations against ISBNs which failed with their sample data... cough cough amature hour so I found real ones etc...
heres the code if you want a peak https://github.com/gregpalaci/nuxt-demo-books
and a preview https://lambent-fenglisu-27a5c4.netlify.app/
I'm 100% not mad I don't really get mad I'm disappointed they were short sighted. but wish them all the best luck finding that developer they want probably less EQ and more IQ.
This was a learning experience and I advise all developers set your boundaries and if the company isn't flexible to accommodate your safe space, don't bother
Top comments (3)
I've blasted both live coding exercises and terminology quizzes for well over a decade now (and the "senior" devs who continue pretending they're useful in any way whatsoever).
I've been on both sides (unfortunately, I didn't always have the authority to scrap them when I was the interviewer). Candidates get nothing but unnecessary stress and a bad impression of their would-be employer, and interviewers who've conducted more than a few should have quickly figured out the only things such interviews tell them: That they favor candidates who have spent more time on leetcode and interview question practice, while disadvantaging the candidates who are actually busy building on a daily basis.
The format is unnecessarily high-pressure, and (hopefully
*) not at all representative of the work environment you're actually providing.*If such a contrived, high-stress, micromanaged scenario is at all representative of your workplace, you should probably run away yourself, and encourage the candidate to do the sameI can't say how much I agree Mike, and really appreciate your comment. I think that's funny enough an agreed intersection of both the for and against articles I posted at the beginning. They are looking for a scripted response you don't know is the first possible issue; and secondary (in the interviewers perspective) is the anxiety and unreal environment they cause and impose on the interviewee.
Agreed if it's inflexible best to run and that is what I will do going forward. When in a hiring position I've been happy to talk tech or high level white board issues, without specific code examples or framework language. But I think a take home test can settle any lasting fear they might have.
Super shame they ask for so much time from candidate then make a rash decision on the 3rd or 4th round. (in my case don't even let me know what they decided 🫨)
I mean 100% performance for a live coding exercise, DO YOU EVEN SCALE BRO?
accessibility need some love tho.
oh and obviously I wrote custome to prerender a dynamic api and prefetch all the remote images and assets.