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pivotal does pair programming interview. The morning with one person in a theoretical problem and afternoon with another in a real problem.

I liked the experience and the process, in the morning it was a blast. We really clicked.

In the afternoon I had to use the same setup as the guy I was collaborating with -- Vim with his bindings and Golang. I had never used Golang before and even tho I was proficient with vim his binding were quite opinionated.

I felt the guy from the afternoon had 0 interest in being programming with me. He wasn't collaborating and was looking at his cellphone the whole time.

The problem was to write a functional test for a CLI that would spawn a web service in Golang, parse some json and run some assertions.

Golang had some quirks with JSON and new line encoding that I spent my whole afternoon with. It is something he could have unblocked me as it a very specific problem, instead he kept telling me to read the official golang docs, not even to google the error.

As someone being interviewed I followed what he asked me to do and worked in his environment but it wasn't a representative of how I would have worked.

That said, I feel it could work! I just should be able to judge the person who pair programmed with me instead of just being judged :) the person in the morning would be a 10/10 and in the afternoon a 4/10.



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