5 Tips to Get Well Along Tech Interviews (Pair Programming Version)

If you are in the stage of doing a tech interview with pairing, this post is for you!

As a software developer with more than 17 years of experience, I came across many types of interviews, the good ones like when they send you the problem and give you 1 week to complete (rare to find, unfortunately) and the ones like live pair programming, when you have some developer from the hiring team acting as your partner while you receive some task to deliver.

So, with my experience doing this type of interview, and also, applying them, here are 5 tips that I consider to be very helpful when dealing with this type of test:

Tip 1 - Work as a pair, not solo

May be obvious, but I've seem many candidates getting afraid of asking things or even sharing their thoughts. The interviewers aren't interested only in you finishing the task as fast as possible, they want to evaluate your team work, if you interact with your partner, if you are capable of accepting ideas and asking for help when needed.

Tip 2 - Study and understand the code beforehand

If you've received the codebase prior to the interview, take some time to build, run, debug. Understand what is being done, what is missing, what can be improved.

Even if you can't change the code, you can do some refactor like organizing into a better architecture, adding unit tests for existing code, replacing some legacy instructions with modern ones. etc. Being interested in the project can give you some points by the hiring team.

Tip 3 - Do not haste

In this type of interview, quality is better than speed. Clean code, TDD, design patterns, apply whenever is possible, even if this can take more time.

Remember that you can't go back to refine, so be refined!

Tip 4 - Refactor

If you take tip 2 seriously, probably you found some opportunities to refactor a few methods or classes. The code is usually inteded to not be perfect, to have some issues, to see who really studied the repository and is able to do more than just the task that was issued.

Tip 5 - Be resourceful

If allowed, don't hesitate on using Google, Stack Overflow or even the language/framework documentation.

They don't expect you to remember everything, just avoid using AI.

Conclusion

I hope that this tips can help you on your journey through the pairing interviews, just remember that the main goal is to evaluate your team work, the knowledge is secondary.