Ask HN: Small companies, how do hire without Leetcode

We talk to them (phone screen). If we bring them in, we just talk to them for a half hour about what's on their resume and stuff.

Then we give them a code sample, a single function that fits on half a sheet of paper. We ask them what it does. We ask about ways it could break, corner cases. We ask them what they would name the function.

Then we give them a small coding problem. They can solve it in any language they want. It's not as trivial as FizzBuzz, but it's not very complex. It's certainly not leetcode. We watch them think through how to write code that would do what we asked. We aren't really watching for syntax errors, but if the code was full of them it would be a concern.

Then we give them a small design problem, one that's not all that clear-cut. We push them on some of the corner cases of the design, and watch them try to adapt the design to cover them.

Total time: Two hours.

This approach has gotten us a pretty solid, competent team.

One of the worst projects I participated in was led by a Leetcode master, good at the 30-line algorithm and terrible at code design and service design.

The best process I participated in included, along with some design scenarios, handing a candidate a laptop computer with their usual IDE and a home directory with a readme and a source tree. They’d read the readme and do the work against the code that was present, find and fix a bug and then add a feature. You learn a lot about what they know and how they think. Google and everything available, if they didn’t know what something meant they looked it up. Simulated work very well.

Probably Covid has put this mode on ice, and it cost a bit of effort to set up, but well worth it.

I do interviews at a decent sized company, but our office is really only 15-20 people. Our process is a bit lacking as we generally do 2 rounds of discussions (1 hour or less each) which has a focus on technical and soft-skill questions.

Its an ok process, but I personally would like to change one of the sessions to be an interactive dev... give a codebase ahead of time, nothing crazy and then get them to drive a solution, be the partner and then also work through a bug. Nothing complicated, I want to see their thought process and how they work as a team. Obviously google etc should be available.

In terms of being able to compete with larger companies, thats not always the case. Maybe not in salary, but thats only part of a job. Culture, perks, and the project itself can all be draws to bring in great devs.

I'd add that my worst ever interview was a coding one, similar to what I described, but the difference was that there were 3 people sat opposite me just watching me, no talking, no chat or fun, nothing. Dont be those people!

I don't do any hiring, but my company mainly does system design tests. Your technical interview will consist of an hour or so discussing how you would design, say, Stack Overflow.