Member-only story
Oh no! I forgot I was conducting an interview
Another week, another recruiting story. The year is still 2016, and we were still in the process of building out the team at Electronic Arts.
We were interviewing this candidate named Matt Kellner for a Software Engineering position on the Marketplace team. Matt was working with Amazon, where he worked on Game Lift and it was clear he had a passion for development and testing. The day of the interview was particularly busy and we also had our first Marketplace Team Offsite that day in Seattle.
My interview with Matt was his last interview of the day. I stepped out from the offsite, kicked off the interview and then we got to a coding question, which was essentially a problem solving question with quite a few corner cases. Matt started digging into it, but after a while he mentioned in passing that it would be so much easier if he had a computer and IDE to code the problem in (as opposed to the whiteboard coding that we were doing).
His passing comment could have been brushed away as a preference, but to me it seemed like a very reasonable accommodation request. So we ended up arranging a computer for him which had the programming environment already set up and let him code. It was going to take him some time to code it all up, so I requested him to excuse myself for some time (I meant 15 minutes) so that I could…
