Have you ever applied to a job as developer and ended up with a bunch of ”code challenges” or ”tasks” to solve on your own and submit? One day, William had a brilliant idea; after participating as co-interviewer in a traditional interview with a candidate, he asked: ”How about we have a mob session instead of just sending [the person] an arbitrary code challenge?”

Henrik was, obviously, overwhelmed with excitement. And so was the Engineering Manager in charge of hiring! A few months later, mob interviews is gaining both ground and traction, becoming a thing within our organization.

In this episode, we explain what it is and how to apply it.

”Mob sessions and mob interviews are really focused on collaboration, working together. If that's the sort of thing you appreciate in your company, I suggest you try mob interviews. They are much more qualitative than just giving a person a code challenges. If thats how you going to do things in your organization... are you going to give a single developer a task and give that person a week to complete the task? I mean yeah, sure. Then you can give them a code challenge the traditional way,” William explains.

”Or if you're going to let that person work in a team in the agile way which involves working together, then you might want to try this as a way to see how that person would work in the future. Because that's what you want, right? You want the forecast of how this person is going to work for your company,” he adds.

Links:

Cyber-dojo: https://cyber-dojo.org/creator/home

”Is you taking notes on a criminal f** conspiracy?” (The Wired Season 3, Episode 5: ”Straight and True”): https://youtu.be/hGo5bxWy21g?t=77

Woody Zuill, ”A day of Mob Programming”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_pvslS4gEI&t=39s&ab_channel=JimmehAHJimmehAH

GOTO 2019, Mob Programming and the Power of Flow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28S4CVkYhWA&ab_channel=GOTOConferencesGOTOConferences

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