For those of you who have experience in the hiring process for developers, what have you found to be a better predictor of success for applicants: work they've done on side projects or performance in a technical interview? Or something else?
We administer a take-home project that's not much more difficult than FizzBuzz. We've almost never had a candidate fail to complete it at all (it should take a mid-level developer no more than an hour to code and verify the simplest possible working solution). But a surprising number return code that is awfully sloppy or reveals a fundamental failure to understand the tools they're working with.<p>One can also usually distinguish juniors and seniors by the level of sophistication of their code. It gives us a good idea of which candidates will be able to work to our standards, or learn to quickly.<p>However, that's only one component of success. We find that personality is far more important (though also much harder to interview for).<p>We need people who are capable of self-management, independent work, and structured thinking in an unstructured environment; who relate their work to the priorities of the rest of the company; who communicate clearly and proactively; and who are collaborative and supportive of one another.<p>People with all those attributes are remarkably difficult to find.
Side projects. Show me what you've done, and run me through how you developed it. Since you developed it, you should know the inner workings of it.