How to Freaking Find Great Developers By Having Them Read Code

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2022-05-16 10:30:08

When hiring developers, there are many things we are looking for, but over the years I have found that raw coding ability is easily the most important quality to look for.   I can quickly train a person to have knowledge in some domain, but I’ve never seen raw coding ability come from anything other than personal commitment to extensive and deep practice.   Because of this, I have found that some methods work better than others to discover talent.

A typical coding interview starts out something like this:  “Write a function that reverses letter order of words in a string.”  Then for the next half hour or more, the candidate scratches out something on the white board (or a shared text document if they are lucky).    This approach is weak for a number of reasons:

So instead of writing code, consider instead having the candidate read existing code and talk about what it does and how it works. This offers some powerful advantages:

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