Interviews à la carte

Let’s face it, software engineering interviews are hard. There are plenty of books out there that talk about this topic to get your candidates head in cracking form to face them. From the interviewers side, there is a lot of time investment as well. Preparation of exercises, reviewing, etc.

With so many exercises and different types of interviews out there, how do we know which one is the best for us but also for the candidate we are about to interview?

Types of interviews

Let’s go quickly over the advantages and disadvantages of some of the most common types of interviews.

Whiteboard

The community over the past years has increasingly reacted against whiteboard interviews, those full of puzzles, riddles and you-better-have-read-about-DFS-the-night-before stuff. The worst part of them is that they aren’t real work life. You are presented with a problem, have let’s say 1h to understand it, get the requirements, think of edge cases, explain your plan, code it and test it. All in a strange environment of some web page that does not have autocompletion or lets you use the shortcuts you’d use in your day to day work. Meet nerves.

The good thing about them is they are short and sweet. You invest 1h of your time and that’s it. No after hours work, no weekend spent…