if i were a hiring manager, i would use a combo of a code review interview and a work sample discussed live, giving precedence to the code review and telling the applicant ahead of time that the work sample doesn’t have to be perfect.
programming is fundamentally a collaborative process. having the applicant collaborate on both sides (reviewing and authoring) shows you a lot about how they work, and signals to them that you care about more than the equivalent of their SAT score.
Glad to see that leedcoding exercises are falling out of fashion. I know white boarding was a popular form of torture. But a good review beats memorization I think too.
Quote Citation: jyn, “an engineer’s perspective on hiring”, 2025-08-08, https://jyn.dev/an-engineers-perspective-on-hiring