Lorin Hochstein 
The three skills with a lot less overlap than you’d expect:
1. Ability to code.
2. Ability to perform well in a coding interview.
3. Ability to validate code.
rk: it’s hyphen-minus actuallyI hate live-coding interviews. If someone is watching me, I forget how to even type. Obviously my 30+ years of writing code, all my open source stuff, my extensive resume, all those papers and conference presentations were just me faking it.
Chris Petrilli@rk @norootcause ever since Google made me write code (not pseudo code, not math) on a fucking white board during an staff engineer interview, I have seen them as an indication of pompous douchebags hazing people.
Nobody writes code like that.
I honestly thought people were exaggerating how stupid they were.
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)I had one of those at Google and it wasn’t that bad, because the interviewer understood it was unrealistic. It was ‘write some C code, this isn’t an IDE so there will obviously be mistakes’, they ignored obvious ones like missing semicolons (I don’t type semicolons in C, my fingers hit the key when my brain sends and end-of-statement signal to my spine) and discussed the others. The interviewer was using it mostly as a ‘how do you respond to code review’ thing, which is a very useful thing to know (and why I like to look at PRs that job applicants have opened on projects other people run). If you get defensive or try to justify why your mistakes are actually correct, you’re probably going to be a pain to work with. Writing on a whiteboard pretty much guarantees that there will be bugs that a reviewer can point at.
arrakeen_urbanite@david_chisnall @petrillic @rk @norootcause I had a similar interview process at Microsoft over 20 years ago. Personally, I found it kind of fun. They only expected pseudocode on the board, and it was honestly a conversation to see what I knew about algorithms and whether I could think on my feet. This was especially important because I was coming from the physical sciences, and my comp sci minor was 10 years in the rear view mirror. It was a different time. One could still land a coding job with a graduate degree in almost anything.