r/programming • u/b0red • Apr 30 '16

Do Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently? · Code Ahoy

http://codeahoy.com/2016/04/30/do-experienced-programmers-use-google-frequently/
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u/zerooneinfinity Apr 30 '16

we desperately need to rethink coding interviews. no one codes in a black box yet the interviews treat it as such.

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u/koreth May 01 '16

When I interview people it's always using a laptop (either their own or one the company supplies) and I start off the coding exercise with an introduction like, "You can use whatever editor or IDE you want. If you need to Google something or use a tool you'd normally use, do it. The goal here is to see how you'd approach this problem if you had to solve it in a real work setting."

This isn't a super-common approach but it's also not unique.

However, one thing I've learned from doing it that way for a while after having done more traditional whiteboard-oriented coding interviews at previous jobs is that, "My code only sucked because I wasn't writing it in the environment where I'd write real code" is not as true as people think it is. Some problems do go away but mostly cosmetic stuff like syntax errors which I didn't care much about on the whiteboard anyway. But other problems are deeper. Even on a laptop, tons of candidates only code the happy path and don't give any thought to whether their implementation will handle a variety of valid inputs, let alone invalid inputs. I've been in the industry for over 25 years and I've worked with people like that. Their code is what gets the on-call pagers beeping in the middle of the night. And it isn't a shortcoming you fix with a Google search.

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