Pair Programming Interview Sample

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The following clip comes from a pair programming session we held recently while interviewing a candidate.

This is completely unscripted. As you can see in the video, the pair programming exercise is low stress and completely aimed at determining a programmers's level.

Terry is a mathematician by training but has worked the majority of his career as a programmer. He recently retired but, following an earth shaking event in his life, he realized that he actually missed working and applied to one of our C# positions.

Israel is one of our trusted freelancers and a specialist in C#.

The sample project is called Bikes Anonymous. BA is an organization that provides licenses or certifications for cyclists from around the world. The task is to write the code necessary to implement a few user stories such as sending an email with a PDF of the license.

The video starts with Terry describing parts of the code that he thinks are in need of refactoring to address issues that came up as a result of having such stringent time constraints. Remember that we ask developers to spend a maximum of 3 or 4 hours working on the sample project. Thus, there are often large parts of the code that were rushed or simply incomplete.

Although you can't see it in the video, I am taking notes of ways in which Terry reveals his level. In the video, I've provided some of those notes so you can see what I'm thinking as Terry talks. Remember that my evaluation is based on our professional ladder and I use the same criteria for all candidates.

After this initial intro, Terry and Israel spend the rest of the hour rewriting the code to make it cleaner, and writing some tests around the functionality.

So, without further ado, I present, Terry and Israel!