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Interviewing Software Developers: From Junior to Architect in a Single Programming Task
Over the years, I’ve interviewed around 100 software developers at Google and roughly the same number across my own companies. One thing has become very clear: Resumes don’t work. They’re too noisy. You get flooded with titles, buzzwords, and irrelevant project summaries. So I distilled everything down to one single task. One prompt I can give to anyone — junior or architect — and instantly get a signal. The task? Write a library that calculates the sum of a vector of values. That’s it. No extra requirements. The beauty is that it looks trivial — but the depth reveals itself as the candidate explores edge cases, generalization, scalability, performance, and design.
Over the years, I’ve interviewed around 100 software developers at Google and roughly the same number across my own companies. One thing has become very clear:
Resumes don’t work.
They’re too noisy. You get flooded with titles, buzzwords, and irrelevant project summaries. So I distilled everything down to one single task. One prompt I can give to anyone — junior or architect — and instantly get a signal.
The task?
Write a library that calculates the sum of a vector of values.
That’s it. No extra requirements. The beauty is that it looks trivial — but the depth reveals itself as the candidate explores edge cases, generalization, scalability, performance, and design.
