Teaching has blackboarding. You pass only if you can write completely unintelligible complicated formulas in the tiny margins of something unrelated.
Ask HN: Do other fields of engineering have an equivalent to whiteboarding?
11–20 of 57 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do other fields of engineering have an equivalent to whiteboarding?
#12EE occasionally has simple circuit stuff on a whiteboard.
Re: Ask HN: Do other fields of engineering have an equivalent to whiteboarding?
#13I work as a snowboard instructor. Training. Certifications. Interviews. The job itself. It's White and Board all the way down.
Re: Ask HN: Do other fields of engineering have an equivalent to whiteboarding?
#14I haven't experienced it, but I've only had a couple interviews/jobs as an electrical engineer before switching to software, where they happen almost every time. I think it's a sign that universities are failing to be trusted as credentialing institutions. You should be able to verify a degree and conclude from that the person learned the material. I guess this is why the professional engineering exams exist.
There's a couple of issues, I think:
- you can get a degree from a lot of universities without learning what you should
- schooling is no substitute for work experience
- software hiring is still generally broken
Re: Ask HN: Do other fields of engineering have an equivalent to whiteboarding?
#15I haven't experienced it, but I've only had a couple interviews/jobs as an electrical engineer before switching to software, where they happen almost every time. I think it's a sign that universities are failing to be trusted as credentialing institutions. You should be able to verify a degree and conclude from that the person learned the material. I guess this is why the professional engineering exams exist.
There's a couple of issues, I think: - you can get a degree from a lot of universities without learning what you should - schooling is no substitute for work experience - software hiring is still generally broken
On top of those, you've got to keep learning when you're out of school. A university degree doesn't remotely guarantee that you'll be suitable for even an entry-level developer job right at graduation, and the correlation between time and skill gets looser as time goes on.
Re: Ask HN: Do other fields of engineering have an equivalent to whiteboarding?
#16I haven't experienced it, but I've only had a couple interviews/jobs as an electrical engineer before switching to software, where they happen almost every time. I think it's a sign that universities are failing to be trusted as credentialing institutions. You should be able to verify a degree and conclude from that the person learned the material. I guess this is why the professional engineering exams exist.
Completely just my opinion, but I think this is because most people (both employers and potential employees) are focusing on the more vocational aspects of programming, whereas university is more theory-based.
I know that I would not have gotten as much out of my degree if I hadn't had prior experience with programming prior to university. It's tough to appreciate why complexity analysis is important if you've never personally experienced a program running slow because you chose a poor algorithm.
And most employers aren't looking for that level of theoretical knowledge. They're looking for people who can quickly get up to speed with the development environment, who can break down a problem into smaller logical chunks, and who can translate those chunks into working code.
If neither employers nor students care about the theoretical knowledge, then what is the point of going for that degree? (IMO, the best course of action would be a few years of on-the-job training, then going to university once you have enough experience to appreciate the theoretical stuff. But that would be a huge culture clash with how things are currently done).
Re: Ask HN: Do other fields of engineering have an equivalent to whiteboarding?
#17I've found the interview process for management consulting roles to be surprisingly similar to tech interviews.
Most interviews are presented as cases[1] where students/applicants have to analyze and propose a strategy to handle example client situations in ~60m.
I've found that the people who have the most success with the interviewing process are the ones who do the most mock and focus on optimizing their skill-set for the interviews, rather than for the actual positions (which is unfortunately similar to tech recruiting and algo/whiteboarding problems).
There is also a ton of online case prep[2] and training materials specifically for the interview process, akin to CareerCup/CTCI/HackerRank/etc.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_interview [2]http://www.consultingcase101.com/tag/free-sample-case/
Re: Ask HN: Do other fields of engineering have an equivalent to whiteboarding?
#18I haven't experienced it, but I've only had a couple interviews/jobs as an electrical engineer before switching to software, where they happen almost every time. I think it's a sign that universities are failing to be trusted as credentialing institutions. You should be able to verify a degree and conclude from that the person learned the material. I guess this is why the professional engineering exams exist.
Unlike electrical engineers, not all software developers have degrees in CS. More than half of the best programmers I know don't have formal education in CS, so it would be a foolish hiring practice to rely on institutional credentials.
Re: Ask HN: Do other fields of engineering have an equivalent to whiteboarding?
#19I haven't experienced it, but I've only had a couple interviews/jobs as an electrical engineer before switching to software, where they happen almost every time. I think it's a sign that universities are failing to be trusted as credentialing institutions. You should be able to verify a degree and conclude from that the person learned the material. I guess this is why the professional engineering exams exist.
There's more to judging a candidate than whether they learned the material. A mastery of CS material does not make a candidate perfect -- I'm still very interested in their problem solving skills and their ability to communicate. For all the problems with whiteboarding they're still the best way to test for those attributes.
Re: Ask HN: Do other fields of engineering have an equivalent to whiteboarding?
#20Another relevant question - does "Sports/competitive " (similar to Competitive Programming, i.e. Olympiad and code/hacker/lity/rank sites) thing exist at all? Such that the tasks are completely different to what one might expect to do on the job.
So e.g. if there is a "Competitive Bridge-Engineering" and the problems are completely different compared to bridge-engineers day job.
To continue this theme - in case you have an opening for bridge engineer - isn't it enough to discuss the previous 5 bridges the candidate has built and maybe also discuss the relevant details the current bridge project entails? Do such bridge-engineers also get irrelevant questions?