Ask HN: Why do companies interview using Google Docs as a coding environment?

During coding interviews, I'm looking for the following evidence in a candidate:

1. how good is the candidate at problem solving?

2. is the candidate able to think in code?

3. are there any glaring syntax errors?

To assess the above three, a whiteboard, paper or Google Docs is sufficient. I'm not averse to using an IDE, just that the IDE's syntax checking hints will shift the candidate's focus to writing syntactically accurate code (#3) rather than on the problem (#1 and #2).

I've never heard of this, and it's completely insane. It sounds like satire.

Stay away from companies that do this if you can. It indicates a deeply broken hiring culture.

I think we're going a little bit crazy with the complaints about the tech interview process lately (I'm not a fan as well). Now it's the shared scratchpad to blame as well?

It's just a shared buffer that works pretty reliably and no interviewer cares about your typos or lack of indentation.

So, they're basically hiring humans to mimic the features of an IDE? Right, sounds like solid plan ...

Honestly, I have no idea why anyone would do this. What this will achieve at best is optimising for rote learning and selecting for people who are capable of writing syntactically perfect code unassistedly. This however is an unrealistic scenario during daily development work because that's - among other things - what an IDE is for.

Problem analysis, mapping requirements to code, finding solutions in a deliberate rather than haphazard manner - these actually relevant aspects of software development aren't assessed at all by such a 'process'.

I'm part of my company's hiring guild. We are revamping the way we hire. Someone on the HR side proposed and almost got Google Docs as part of the tech screen and on site coding interviews. I successfully pushed back. The real goal is collaboration or collaborative editing, and that is just the first tool that jumps to mind. There are others. What I'm pushing for is just screen sharing (probably with zoom or hangouts) and the candidate uses their own computer or a loaner laptop.

It shows mastery of the language, one could argue. With the tools available today it makes development a lot faster and easier. Functions have tooltips on how to use it, you can scroll through the available functions, libraries imported, and more. While it is unpleasant, it is an exercise that demonstrates your independence from dev tools.

why do they care if you have memorized all of each languages specific apis when you can easily look them up on the fly with intellisense or similiar. My own pet peeve since being super dyslexic despite being a solid programmer I memorize very little just the general idea and capability of how different constructs generally work across languages.

I don't know if they are ok with you taking the liberty to make some changes to google docs.

There is an add on called Code Blocks that you can install on google docs for free. Huge language support - but don't expect it to be a fully functional ide.

Other than that, you'll want to turn off auto-capitalization, and spell checking from Tools->Preferences.

Worse is better. It's an easy place to do collaborative editing. For google specifically, I think they leverage some google docs automation for capturing artifacts for hiring committee in their interview workflow.

Never heard of this, is this an actual thing?