Article · Short read

How to Assess Technical Skills During Interviews Without Coding Tests

daily.dev Free Beginner

A tidy rundown of alternatives to whiteboard puzzles: portfolio walkthroughs, short representative tasks, and conversations about past decisions. It maps almost one to one onto our short answer and keeps take-homes time-boxed and respectful of a candidate's time. Good quick orientation before you design your own process.

  • Swap artificial puzzles for short, job-representative tasks.
  • Walk through past work to surface the real decisions.
  • Keep take-homes to two or three hours out of respect.

The question it answers

  1. How do I evaluate a developer's skill if I can't code?

Read with it

  1. A high-signal, battle-tested framework for evaluating engineering talent from a leader who's done it hundreds of times.... First Round Review Article · ~20 min read My Lessons from Interviewing 400+ Engineers Over Three Startups Marco Rogers
  2. Battle-tested YC advice on landing your critical first engineering hire, from founders who've done it at scale. It reframes... YC Startup Library Article · Essay How to hire your first engineer (YC Startup Library) Y Combinator (Greg Brockman, Harj Taggar)
  3. Once your bottleneck really is your hands and not your clarity, this piece covers how a non-technical founder finds, vets, and... The Founder's Corner Article · 10 min read How Non-Technical Founders Can Hire Great Developers Chris Tottman and Ruben Dominguez
  4. A Startup School talk with a YC partner and Triplebyte's co-founder on finding and hiring key engineers from scratch.... Y Combinator Startup Library Video · Around 45 minutes Building an engineering team Harj Taggar and Ammon Bartram
  5. A simple, repeatable four-step method for making hiring decisions instead of going on gut feel, which is where costly mis-hires... Geoff Smart and Randy Street Book · Book, around 200 pages Who: The A Method for Hiring Geoff Smart and Randy Street
  6. A venture firm's field guide to engineering hiring for founders, covering the full arc from defining the role to sourcing,... CRV Article · Long read How to Hire Engineers: A Guide for Founders CRV
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →