Hiring Tip: Pair Program on Open Source Bugs

During our last hiring round, I had a really nice cross-browser bug at hand, and I ran our finalists through a coding session where they remoted to my laptop and had one hour to fix the bug or get as far as they could. Instead of a contrived puzzle they were working on production code. It was great! And since they all worked on the same bug, I was able to score them on a ten point scale for easy comparison.

We've started another hiring round, and this time I didn't have any good Python bugs at hand. What to do? Open source! We use the CherryPy framework a fair bit here (the maintainer is on our team). So this round I am pairing up for an hour of work on CherryPy. It moves an open source project forward, it's cleaner than having people work on proprietary code, and we still get a great picture of each candidate. Win all over the place. This time I am inviting candidates to share their screen with me rather than vice versa. Last time I tried at least installing the person's editor of choice, but there's no place like ~, ya know? Another thing that happened last time is that by the end of the interviews I had gone through the exercise so many times that it felt much less like pair programming and much more like thumb-screwing. At the expense of a neat scoring system, I am not going to go over the same ground this time. I already updated one CherryPy ticket, and we'll keep chipping away at that one and others. I expect some level of familiarity with Python and its tools, but I'm happy to teach you what I know. A nice side-effect is that I get to learn what you know too. :^)

We've got three spots open and we're just starting interviews, so if you'd like to pair together for an hour on CherryPy, hit me up at chad.whitacre@yougov.com.