summera

Hello all!

Over the last several years I've performed a lot of software engineering interviews. During that time I iterated on the evaluation process to find something that allowed us to make hiring decisions with confidence.

There are a lot of coding interview products and tools out there, but most don't come close to imitating how we work on a day-to-day basis. Whether a candidate can solve a random live coding challenge on the spot isn't an accurate representation of their abilities, especially in a world where we work remotely and asynchronously.

Eventually, I settled on a take-home process of sharing a private Github repo with candidates, asking them to follow the directions in the README and submit a Pull Request - just like we would in our day-to-day work. This gives me a lot of insight into what it's really like to work with that person. For example, I can learn how they communicate in a written and asynchronous manner, how they formulate their commit messages, and how they make decisions.

The downside is that this process was time consuming and manual. For each candidate, I had to take the project source code, create a new project repo, invite the candidate, and keep track of all outstanding projects. So naturally, I created a tool to automate the process :). Feedback and questions welcome!

Custom solution or using third-party SSO providers like okta?

Totally agree with this sentiment in theory - it's best to keep the environments as similar as possible. But in practice there are requirements that will differ, such as having production be publicly available and staging be protected, mocking of certain third-party services that may not be available in a non-production environment, etc.