Coding tests are an awful place to test someone’s conversational skills. I don’t talk while I code. You don’t either. Honestly I can’t even remember the last time I talked to anyone about the code itself outside of a PR. People talk about architecture and database migrations and why their containers aren’t behaving locally. Nobody ever tests for that stuff.
That's quite an assumption. You've never heard of pair programming? You've never asked for help on a bug in your code? You've never talked through alternate approaches to a piece of code with a coworker? You've never hashed out an interface or a method signature or some pseudocode while talking through the problem? You've never walked through a calculation with an SME? All of these are "code and talk at the same time" exercises.
If I'm being brutally honest, I have a deep-seated suspicion that everyone who says they can't talk and code at the same time also just cannot code at all. I don't know you, of course, and I'd love to be proven wrong. My sample size is small, but the few people I've met who cannot talk-and-code also simply could not code.
Here's my brutally honest take on pair programming: Usually 1 person wants to do it more than the other, and usually that person is being unnecessarily assertive.
The only scenario I think pair programming is socially acceptable to force on developers is a senior type onboarding a new developer out of necessity - might screen share and direct them around some places to show the ropes.
Of course if you love to hang out with someone else while you write code for some reason - more power to you, have fun. For me it's a private thing, even after 20+ years. If anything the LLM is a much more useful sidekick to figure things out.
> Can't talk and code means can't code at all
I disagree with that, I can't even have lyrics in my music really if I'm working on something super hard especially outside my normal wheelhouse. It would at least be disruptive.
The last time "hanging out and coding" was a thing was learning it for the first time - I used to hang out with friends as a kid and we would all try to figure out what Visual Basic was lol and I remember hanging with a friend learning JavaScript during the early web days, drinking coffee through the night, good times.
These days it would feel forced and can't imagine why anyone would regularly pair program, especially now with LLMs.
Lots of people in tech have never heard of pair programming, because it's an absurd idea. This site isn't just silicon valley. This is a tiny fraction of the tech universe.
Personally I only ask super easy questions because you should at least be able to talk about something trivial. Yet unfortunately the question “find the second largest number in an array of numbers” has a high failure rate as the first question, because there are a lot of people lying on their resume just throwing spaghetti at the walls.
This provided me with a fascinating, albeit somewhat familiar, piece of insight: which is that I don't really ever hear my inner monologue. I'm not sure I have one! I'm either typing out my thoughts as I have them or speaking them as I have them.
I struggle in coding interviews precisely because of this: either I end up vocalizing my emotions and insecurities instead of coding, or I end up coding instead of talking about what I'm trying to accomplish. Often I will see many alternate pathways branching out before me, but if I try to start talking about them, I am no longer coding, and so my brain context-switches to "social and emotional."
Probably something I could get better at with practice, but I honestly end up commenting on places like HN simply because it "allows" me to think. If I could have a coding interview in the form of realtime text chat + code, that would be ideal for me.
I guess I have seen companies do things like "contribute to this open source project and work through an MR." I do find that quite appealing as an interview process.
Interestingly, it turns out a large number of people have no inner monologue. [1]
Some studies indicate that it's as low as 30% of people who do (so 70% don't have an inner monologue), while others show the opposite, implying around 75% of people have some amount of inner monologue while 25% do not. It's a difficult subject to test and study since we don't have direct access to people's minds and asking someone what they're thinking about literally forces their thoughts through the filter of language.
This is a fairly common condition, along the same lines as aphantasia (lack of inner-picture, rather than inner-voice). I do not believe there is any “cure” for it.
I don’t have a sense of a persistent inner voice either, but I can verbalise my thoughts just fine. It feels to me like the part of my brain that turns thoughts into English sentences automatically goes to sleep when it’s not being used. And that brain power can be used for something else.
When I’m doing particularly hard programming work, I can’t have words said near me. Even music with lyrics messes me up. I think because it wakes up my “thoughts to English” pathway and that gets in the way of my “thoughts to code” pathway.
Anyway, I don’t want to be cured. There’s nothing wrong with my mind. If anything I feel sorry for people who can’t turn off their inner dialogue, because it means they can never use those neurons for other tasks - like maths or programming.
Personally I can talk while programming if an interviewer wants that, but I’ll be a bit dumber at the keyboard than if I sat in silence.
i am the same except i use music (lyrics and all) to drown everything else out. i don’t. price the lyrics at all, but my brain is processing them because every now and then i suddenly break out of focus and am like “wait, what the hell did that song just say?” usually on comedy songs
For me, it's not at all "I'm incapable of explaining this to you given a few minutes to collect my thoughts." and very much "You either get Coding Mode, or you get Conversation Mode, but not only do you never get both at the same time, I need time to context switch from one to the other.".
And I've been programming professionally for quite a long while now, so this quirk of mine doesn't seem to have made it difficult for me to work at programming shops.
As I've gotten older I've discovered that I really can't judge normalcy based on what I find natural to me. Every brain is different and abilities range. Some people visualize things in their head; some people have to talk out their thoughts; some people are more optimistic. If we are only grading on one very particular brain type then we are missing out on the opportunities for diverse thought patterns producing something even better than expected.
It's not a test of someone's conversational skills, its a test of their technical communication. Conversational skills get tested in the small talk and introduction phases at the start and end of the interview.
