How can you not like coffee? I’m truly aghast!

Seriously, though, I’m just putting across my perspective on things. The subject as to whether coding tests during interviews is extremely divisive — not up there with tabs and spaces, but of a similar level to vi vs. emacs.

With Java, that’s totally my personal opinion on watching the language develop since the start into a kind of verbose monstrosity that slows down and finally kills everything it runs on. If C# was an ineffective multi-coloured foam hammer, Java would be a big rusty hammer that can’t bit the nail you want and leaves bits of rust everywhere. In slow motion. With a handle that’s as long as its usual line length — massive. I have to draw a line, in my work at least, against some languages and Java is one of them. There are more!

Interviewing really isn’t my speciality to be honest, as I usually sit in as a technical references of some kind, but my main message is that talking to a candidate is far and away the best method I’ve found to gauge both their skills and their ‘fit’.