Also describes the interview process this company uses:
> Firstly, how do we hire at R3? We’re recruiting for technical roles around the world as part of building an open source Bitcoin-inspired decentralised database. The interview process for developers consists of, firstly, a piece of code that you’re asked to send back a quick code review of (this is meant to take about 5 minutes), then an 30–60 minute long video chat+screenshare in which you may join from home and some coding is done in an editor and language of your choice*, then finally an invitation on site to meet the team and talk to senior management. The code test sometimes also includes design and ‘talky’ questions, depending on the nature of the candidate and precise job role: it’s not just coding. We’ve found this process to be pretty accurate whilst still being quite lightweight (compared to some hiring processes at least!).
All I would need added to that style of interview is something along the lines of:
"And if you have to Google things during the video call, go right ahead. But try to talk through your thought process."
So that I don't go into the interview feeling super nervous about the moment where I get to say, "I'm googling the bidict library because I forget the API. But I want to use a bidict because..."
We allow candidates to use Google if they need to during the interview. However, the interviewer is free to draw conclusions from that. If a candidate is routinely searching for things that someone using the language would use every day, that's going to count against them. If they need to look up something that is only rarely used, nobody will care.
There can be occasional disagreement about what's reasonable to look up. A surprising number of developers don't know how to read from files, and I've encountered a few that didn't know files are random access. Some people think that's a problem, others think it's expected. I tend to see ability to use files as a proxy for general experience, which for R3's projects matters a lot (we aren't writing generic database-backed web apps, there's a significant R&D component to it).
> Firstly, how do we hire at R3? We’re recruiting for technical roles around the world as part of building an open source Bitcoin-inspired decentralised database. The interview process for developers consists of, firstly, a piece of code that you’re asked to send back a quick code review of (this is meant to take about 5 minutes), then an 30–60 minute long video chat+screenshare in which you may join from home and some coding is done in an editor and language of your choice*, then finally an invitation on site to meet the team and talk to senior management. The code test sometimes also includes design and ‘talky’ questions, depending on the nature of the candidate and precise job role: it’s not just coding. We’ve found this process to be pretty accurate whilst still being quite lightweight (compared to some hiring processes at least!).