Should I disqualify candidates if they Google the answer and type it verbatim in a phone screen?

Question

I am a new interviewer and am trying to learn how to screen a good candidate from a bad one. I had a case in which the candidate looked up the answer to my question on the internet and after just changing a few variable names here and there, claimed that she suddenly came up with the right answer. The answer matched the published answer right down to curly braces for compound statements and tab indentation.

My question here is not how to prevent someone from cheating, rather if there is any use in disqualifying such candidates. It says something about their integrity (perhaps I have been a TA too long :) ) but as my manager said, they would be tested in the loop later anyway when they won't have access to the computer.

EDIT:

Thanks everyone for your response. Clarifying a few things since they were asked:

1. It was a Skype based screening interview with the screen shared.
2. I think it was pretty clear that I didn't want to Google the answer since I explicitly said I wanted to test how you think about the problem and can code it (but not Google skills). Maybe I should be more explicit about that, good point.
3. Don't ask questions from the internet - this is an arms race IMHO. Eventually what you ask will land up on the internet, especially if the question seems good.
4. As suggested, I did go down the lengths of questioning about concepts rather than just the code (before and after the code was copied). The answers came back the same as the comments written in the reference code :-)
5. I think posting the question would detract from the topic, but the question was not a standard FizzBuzz-style question. When I gave the question to fellow devs, they solved it well within 20 minutes (or less).

Answer 1

An answer is only as good as the question that was asked.

This is unfortunately a case of asking a bad question that can simply be Googled like those famous "how many potholes" questions you see everywhere.

If this person was already hired and you asked them the same question, and they Googled the answer and provided it to you, wouldn't you be happy with that? This is how a practical workplace operates and the reason why sites like StackOverflow are so popular.

You do not want your employees to be solving problems that have already been solved or are trivial in nature. If a solution exists - especially if it has been proven, it is almost always better to use that solution instead of designing your own. Therefore, you want employees that excel at understanding a problem, breaking it down to its component parts, identifying the common solutions and finally spending time on what is unique with that problem for that specific domain or application.

If you hire a software developer to write an API framework - you do not expect him or her to write a HTTP library from scratch. But when interviewing developers for these positions, that is a typical question most interviewers will ask.

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As someone who has also had to struggle to come up with practical and insightful interview questions for programmers - it is difficult to come up with something that isn't trivial (so that it can't be looked up) while still generic enough that you can observe the quality that you are trying to see in the candidate.

Here is an example:

1. Bad: "Write a bubble sort".
2. Better: "What is the difference between a bubble sort and an insertion sort?"
3. Even Better: "When is the bubble sort not efficient?"

You want to get an idea for the depth of a candidate's knowledge and their thinking analytical process - not judge how good their "Google-fu" is. But many times that's what ends up happening with bad questions.

You should definitely not disqualify someone who is smart enough to know how to research a question - you should instead concentrate on asking the right questions for that particular candidate.

Answer 2

It depends the question.

If this was a FizzBuzz-style filter question, absolutely. Too many people, too little time. As a slight aside, if you're giving a question like this (recommended), it is probable that given a large enough group of people some of them will produce the exact answer with the exact syntax as the first Googled result. Especially if that first answer found is in 1TB or another common coding style. I've seen this.

If this was "know the obscure language feature or class", nah. If we're honest, a surprising amount of programming (i.e. coding, not design or architecture) is done by looking up the answer. And that is a pretty good skill. A large number of, supposed, programmers will make a hack-together-buggy-mess of hundreds of lines of code when the first answer on Stackoverflow is correct and five lines. But if they lie about possessing this skill, I wouldn't trust them on the skills they claim to have. Lying would be an instant disqualification in my books.

If this was a difficult problem, they struggled for awhile, then they found the answer online verbatim. Disqualified. If this was a difficult problem, they struggled for awhile, then they found the answer online and needed to change critical pieces (or they only liberated one piece of code into their solution), it is ok but not optimal. I deduct 'points'. That would be the most gray case.

Answer 3

My question here is not how to prevent someone from cheating, rather if there is any use in disqualifying such candidates.

Of course there is a use in disqualifying candidates who cheat - you are removing the cheaters from your further interviews.

You characterize this as "cheating". And you are basically saying that this candidate lied to you ("claimed that she suddenly came up with the right answer").

So you have to decide - do you want to hire cheats and liars?

I know I don't. If someone lies to me, I assume that they will continue to lie to me. That's not something I'd want to see on my team.

Answer 4

My question here is not how to prevent someone from cheating, rather if there is any use in disqualifying such candidates. It says something about their integrity (perhaps I have been a TA too long :) ) but as my manager said, they would be tested in the loop later anyway when they won't have access to the computer.

Has it been made clear before that "cheating" (aka finding solutions online) is explicitly not allowed for this interview question? I know interviewers that tacitly encourage this kind of thing, as a test of wits kind of situation.

If it was explicitly forbidden, then sure, you should disqualify that person. Violating interviewing rules set beforehand is a major red flag and signals that this individual is unwilling to even follow direct orders.

Answer 5

There is a level of integrity to be considered. I would follow-up with asking the person if they looked it up. You may find that they not only admit it, but they feel this is better than not getting the job done or taking an excessive amount of time and energy doing something that is routine (e.g. Fizzbuzz)

The real risk of the "copy and paste coders" is that they are applying a chunk of code inappropriately and possibly may not know how to adapt, adjust, debug, enhance. A brief coding session with some questions about there work should give you an indication if they still know what they're doing.

I write about 2-3 connections strings a year if I'm lucky-the next one is going to get copied and pasted with some minimal changes to get it to work.

You need to beef-up your interview and make it closer to the required task. Chances are, some internet searching is going to be required, so make sure candidates are doing it correctly. Few people can get by in a job just by looking up answers to trivia questions.

Answer 6

The problem you're going to face is proving they did "cheat".

If the problem is trivial enough to google, it's probably trivial enough to come up independently with similar solution to what's already been done by other people.

What you can do is get them to explain how the solution works - but won't definitively prove they "cheated" (or not).

At best, you can make a note that this person's solution is remarkably similar to the one on google, and talk to your manager about it (which you have done).

In the long-term - you should design tests that can't be googled.