You will lose the best candidates with an onerous coding challenge.

Our process, which has been heavily influenced by debate on r/experiencedevs on reddit involves a short phone screen, a 30 MINUTE coding challenge, a tech interview consisting of pair programming, and a non-tech interview with management. Very light.

The coding challenge is a FILTER only. It’s not to evaluate who to hire, but instead it’s to filter who not to continue interviewing.

You learn a lot during pair programming in a short period of time, including personality and team fit. We let them drive and we just watch and discuss. The assignment is to fix a bug, and refactor the code the caused the bug.

Zero downtime deployments can get very complex for heavy usage apps, such as blue-green deployment.

We decided to avoid the complexity with some practical workarounds.

• Most deployments happen at 4am. “develop” branch merges deploy at 4am, and “master” branch merges deploy immediately.
• We force browser refresh if the front end detects the back end has had breaking changes. We attempt to re-populate form field values.
• During database migrations, we send 503 with Retry-After header in response to POSTs. Our client code knows to wait for that time and try again. If the time is too long, the user gets a friendly message that it will try again in X seconds. GETs are handled by an available read-replica, if possible.