Using the Right Coding Interview to Hire Engineers

Software engineers, data engineers, data scientists, and DevOps engineers are expensive and a pain to hire. Companies use technical challenges to assess a candidate’s coding capabilities. However, it’s tough to get it perfect since there is only so much an interview that can capture about an engineer’s technical potential. Many companies do not put structure around their hiring process and assume as long as any technical interview takes place, the candidate is qualified. Unfortunately, hiring the wrong candidate can be detrimental to both the capabilities of the team as well as the company’s progress in building new features.

During these interviews, there is a trade-off between assessing an engineer’s working style, thought patterns/problem-solving skills, coding abilities, and communication skills. There are many types of coding interviews- White Boarding, Coding Challenges, etc.. and each assess different skillsets in varying degrees. Let’s discuss the trade-off between using these different technical interview techniques, what they accomplish, and how to best deploy them.

We Will Cover

1. Take-Home Assignment
2. Take-Home Timed Coding Challenge
3. In-Person Whiteboarding Interview
4. In-Person Pair Coding

In the end, I will provide our recommendation for how to interview engineers more efficiently.

Take-Home Assignment