"How to create an interview rubric that actually works"
"The best engineering interview question I've ever gotten" Part 1 Part 2: The challenge: Modifying memcached -- Via its incr and decr commands, memcached provides a built-in way to atomically add k to a number. But it doesn’t provide other arithmetic operations; in particular, there is no "atomic multiply by k" operation. Your programming challenge: Add a mult command to memcached.
"Backend challenges": A public list of open-source challenges from jobs around the world.
Companies hiring without whiteboards
A Linguistic Comparison of Letters of Recommendation for Male and Female Chemistry and Biochemistry Job Applicants: "Letters of recommendation are central to the hiring process. However, gender stereotypes could bias how recommenders describe female compared to male applicants. In the current study, text analysis software was used to examine 886 letters of recommendation written on behalf of 235 male and 42 female applicants for either a chemistry or biochemistry faculty position at a large U.S. research university. Results revealed more similarities than differences in letters written for male and female candidates. However, recommenders used significantly more standout adjectives to describe male as compared to female candidates. Letters containing more standout words also included more ability words and fewer grindstone words. Research is needed to explore how differences in language use affect perceivers’ evaluations of female candidates." (2007)
Interviewing for Evidence: When you interview a candidate, you are making a mutual buying decision. You want to know whether to make them an offer, and you want them to have enough information to decide whether this role/team/company is right for them. ... The key here is evidence: things you observed, things you heard, things the candidate did or said. The important distinction is that these are factual rather than inferred. ‘The candidate answered a different question’ is a fact. ‘The candidate seemed nervous’ is an assumption. What did you observe that led you to believe they were nervous? Write that down instead.
Harvey CEO explains why he interviews candidates in Google Docs: 'There are folks that are really good at talking': Winston Weinberg, cofounder and CEO of the AI legal tech startup Harvey, told the "Access" podcast that he uses a shared document. "Very quick writing samples, doing a written project back and forth, is very, very helpful," Weinberg said. Weinberg said that he has interviewed candidates who are good at "presenting things," but that they "break down" when writing out responses to direct questions. Going back-and-forth on a problem set in Google Docs is a "very good indicator of how well we'd work together," he said.
Last modified 14 December 2025