Which type of pre-onsite technical interview is the best for recruiting engineers?

Timed coding challenges, phone screens, and take home assignments; which do developers actually prefer and why?

Karina Chow
UX Collective
Published in
8 min readApr 20, 2021

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3 illustrations of a candidate interviewing via phone screen, online challenge, and take-home assessment.
Illustration made using Stubborn

Like many engineers, I’ve had a career full of horrible interviewing experiences, both as a candidate and an interviewer. As a candidate, I’ve been told to write a distributed system implemented using mutexes on a whiteboard. I wrote it in pseudo code to a silent and judgmental interviewer, and then was told I failed the interview because I didn’t write the name for the Java mutex package correctly. Java was not listed on my resumé and I had never written it professionally.

As an interviewer, I interviewed a person whose skillset only included writing HTML and CSS, but who was convinced they were deserving of a senior engineering title. I gave them a hard pass, but I was overruled. Then I was told I had to be their onboarding partner and mentor for the next few months.

Many years of facepalm-worthy interview experiences would turn most people off from wanting to ever interview on either side of the table ever again. Instead, it awoke the part of my brain that loves solving user problems. By all measures, interview experience problems are user experience problems.

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🇨🇳 🇩🇪 Creative technologist based in Brooklyn and SF. Writes about technology × design × art × psychology. Previous eng @Patreon, @Honor, @Microsoft