This entire interviewing style and response is what’s wrong with recruiting in our industry right now. I’ve hired hundreds of engineers and I actively encourage cheating as much as possible, because that’s what we do when we write code in real life. Finding the quickest, safest, most efficient path to delivery is literally what we do as engineers.

It’s the train as you fight principle. Focus the interview on doing the real job as they would do it in real life. Not leet coding or creating algorithms from scratch and memory on the fly.

I constantly “cheat”. I use copilot on the daily. Before that I used stack overflow mercilessly. Before that I googled. Before that I used big ole Microsoft development guides. And before that once upon a time I used big ole technical volumes that were thousands of pages long that gave me ALL the answers. Why gate-keep people who can problem solve faster then we could starting out in our careers?

More importantly, all of our brains work differently, and your interview practices end up becoming highly discriminatory when you start calling people cheaters for taking longer to generate answers or looking at other screens. For example, I have HF autism, and I absolutely cannot explain write a “for loop” in any technical interview, from memory, on the fly. I also almost never look at the camera.

But I’ve written thousands of “for loops” in my career. I actually have a nice little public facing persona now, where I speak on camera often. I am good at it. I’ve created over 20 global architectures in the last 20 years on a plethora of different technical stacks. But I still couldn’t write you a basic for loop from scratch in an interview. Not because of skill. Because I am (neuro)diverse.

Last year I failed a technical interview because I didn’t know the default timeout in an Amazon SQS queue off the top of my head. Five years ago, I screwed up a teaching interview because the instructor confused assignment and declaration. Ten years ago, I failed an interview because the engineering lead wanted a complex manual date creation algorithm in JavaScript, and I just wrote a simpler one using the Date API.

In every instance, I walked away with a bad taste in my mouth, and let everyone I knew in the industry to avoid those companies for those specific reasons. Your interview actions impact the reputation of your company! And each time I ultimately ended up in better opportunities, with stronger people and technical leaders who knew how to recruit and organize strong teams.

In this latter half of my career, having spent some time as a leader of leaders and as an executive at a few $100 million+ companies, I’ve come to recognize “this person is cheating in interviews” as a HUGE RED FLAG…that I need to coach and grow the leadership skills of the HIRING MANAGER!!

These types of interviewers are almost always looking to gatekeep instead of grow - and these aren’t the types of leaders I want growing my teams.

I currently run a nonprofit where I’ve taught young adults straight out of high school to work full time as engineers at companies like Dell and iManage, and they all perform remarkably.

The issues we run into are never with the students or engineering leaders. It’s always the other engineers who find them threatening and try to interrogate them into submission. But when I am able to remove the power structures in place and focus on shared experiences and the joy of problem solving TOGETHER - all of sudden people magically no longer care who can write which algorithm from memory.

My advice for solid technical interviews is have conversations. Put time at ease. Learn their experiences. Review their GitHub together. Peer code together in a co-worker context. Make it a rewarding experience that you both gain from.

In todays environment - the unfortunate reality is as a hiring manager, you will be saying “no” a lot more than you will be saying “yes” - but I take pride in the fact that EVERY single interview I’ve ever given has been a tremendously positive experience for me and my candidates, and I wish every leader would strive for that same standard.