Skip to content

Comment on Aaron Swartz: How I Hire Programmers

Comments

I'm surprised nobody has talked about pairing interviews in the comments yet. I spent years clumsily hiring developers crapshoot-style. I shared the misconceptions that people get so nervous during technical interviews that it obviates their usefulness and that it doesn't really matter if a candidate writes code or not during their interview. My current employer, Pivotal Labs, hired me after a first interview that consists of interview-y conversation and a short pairing exercise followed by a second full day of pairing with the team on an actual project.

I know pairing is sometimes controversial around these parts, but for interview purposes its benefits are pretty evident.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.