Back to Maya Rodriguez
How I run a 45-minute technical screen
July 18, 2026
The exercise I've used to hire 12 engineers over the last three years — and the two signals I actually care about.
Most technical screens ask people to invert a binary tree under a stopwatch. I hate that format. Here's what I do instead.
The exercise
I hand candidates a real 200-line file from a shipped codebase and ask them to walk me through what it does, then propose a refactor.
What I'm listening for
- Do they read code top-down or bottom-up? Both are fine, but the ones who explain WHY before HOW almost always ship better work.
- Do they ask about the caller before they touch the callee? This is the single strongest correlate I've found with senior judgment.
Everything else is negotiable.