Chemistry has whiteboarding, but instead of writing algorithms or code, you're expected to be able to draw structures, reactions, and synthesis. It's also similar in that this is not necessarily a core part of most chemists everyday job, but something you study for to be able to interview or give presentations regarding your research.
I've never heard of whiteboarding a chemical reaction mechanism. Usually since most chemists at a comparable 'engineering level' to programmers are phds, a seminar is expected, and the candidate has something ready to go. It's an opportunity for the team to learn something new while assessing the critical thinking skills of the candidate during the q&a
I've witnessed it in the post-seminar lab visits. It bears little resemblance to the "whiteboard interview" from the developer world, but if you're visiting with a faculty member after you present your work, they may ask you to help them understand some piece of your work by drawing out the mechanism.
I'll disagree with the GP, though, on its applicability to "real-world" work. When I did chemistry, diagraming out a reaction mechanism and pondering it over with colleagues gathered in front of the chalkboard was a daily activity.
Not quite engineering, but related: Professional orchestras have auditions, where you will perform a piece from the solo repertoire in front of the head of the section you are auditioning for, and a few other key staff (e.g. [1]). Some auditions will include orchestral parts, and you can buy books of famous solos for most instruments. This repertoire has little in common with the kind of playing you will be paid for,…
When auditioning, would the applicant know which pieces of music they will be required to perform beforehand? I am assuming that they do, which would make it very different from 'whiteboarding' from a software engineering interview. In software engineering interviews, most of the time the interviewer will try to have prepared questions that the interviewee has NOT seen before. To make it more like an audition, the qu…
I was just reading along here, and thinking that I’d much rather whiteboard for the rest of my life than ever take another orchestral audition, although each of these practices is only loosely related to what you will do on the job itself. I recently switched to software development from a professional career in classical and jazz music. Here’s the view from the performance hall: A top five orchestral audition (the ones that pay a sort of "living wage") comes around 2-4 times a year these days, if you’re very lucky. Typically, around 200 players of that instrument apply for this rare opportunity, and they come from all over the world- language is no barrier-we welcome international competition, and they will have no problem working here if not from the USA. Conversely, Americans can’t really audition in the EU, with rare exceptions for principals and special situations. There are no even slightly weak players anymore; everyone at the audition has a list of around 20- 30 complete symphonic pieces (we don’t get these from books- we buy the complete scores, and are prepared with pieces not on this list— we have to take the other 2 that year, remember.) rock solid memorized, along with at least two of the required/allowed concertos, a Bach Suite, and possibly some longer solos that come up in the orch. repertoire. Each piece is around 15-20 pages long, and represents tricky “algorithms" in performance technique. (think of it like this- one might be: “performing Dijkstra’s algorithm in the manner of a Shakespeare monologue, but in his accent, using his exact vocal inflections, breathing points, and slang ornaments to show you understand the linguistic trends of his time and heritage-but yelling it from a stage on demand through a fussy megaphone prone to glitch, while evoking the feeling of a whisper in an office”, and that would be one of 20) There is always sight reading at major orchestral auditions— I never took one that didn’t have it. Every single player at the audition is a graduate of Juilliard (or another one of the top 5 private conservatory programs in the US) and the age range is from about 20-50 because there are no jobs. (think the top 5 CS grads of Stanford, MIT, etc… dating back to the 90s) We have all known one another since childhood, because it takes that long to learn the required repertoire and technique. At the audition, zero-1 mistakes are allowed, because there is no other way to cut people from rounds- everyone is prepared to an Olympic level, and many are on beta-blockers or complex drug cocktails so they can handle the pressure of doing this several times a year. This has all been the case since the early 90s. Younger auditioners who don’t already play in major orchestras (yes, these players are competing too, so think- top professor in CS/AI at Stanford against you at the whiteboard) must put in 4-7 hours every day for 5-7 months before the audition (players know it will come up before it is announced and practice old lists- like for the MET Orchestra or others). In addition to this, a string player can not compete acoustically in a hall with colleagues who play Strads on an instrument that costs less than $30,000. (this has nothing to do with their technique) To think that someone could win one of these with just an undergrad degree is ludicrous. Orchestral rep is not really covered in this fashion in undergraduate work. In addition, the orchestra often selects no one at all from these highly qualified people, each of whom paid for a plane ticket and hotel room for three nights, not to mention a $100 set of strings a bow rehair, and perhaps a $200 instrument adjustment, and perhaps a “lesson” with a member of the section- also $120-200. Taking a single audition is very, very expensive. Auditions at lesser orchestras that do not pay a living wage often have much longer repertoire lists and demands (insecurity with their status/ignorance about what separates the wheat from the chaff), but one still has to fly/hotel there.
All that said, orchestra auditions didn’t used to be like this. They started out in the 40s and 50s resembling more of a whiteboard kind of a thing. Just saying— we need to think about where this might be going one day...
I'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…
Agreed on your comment (ex software dev, now management consultant)..
In MC, the delivery of the case is extremely important (how you structure the solution, how you speak, how you present yourself, etc.). Your point on people optimizing is spot on. Some students spend 10-20 hours a week practising before a McKinsey, Bain, BCG interview..
When I'm building cases and interviewing people, I try to structure it around a real life problem we have (e.g. a wood/fiber B2B company wanting to go B2C) which makes it less awkward than solving random algorithms.
However, I'm still not satisfied with the process, so wondering if people have ideas ?
I thought about giving a case to solve at home, but we're missing the part of how an applicant will react with a lot of pressure and in front of clients :/
I'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…
Agreed on your comment (ex software dev, now management consultant).. In MC, the delivery of the case is extremely important (how you structure the solution, how you speak, how you present yourself, etc.). Your point on people optimizing is spot on. Some students spend 10-20 hours a week practising before a McKinsey, Bain, BCG interview.. When I'm building cases and interviewing people, I try to structure it around a…
Hey, cool story! May I ask how you got into MC? How old where you? How long have you been a Software Dev? Did you do an MBA?
Not quite engineering, but related: Professional orchestras have auditions, where you will perform a piece from the solo repertoire in front of the head of the section you are auditioning for, and a few other key staff (e.g. [1]). Some auditions will include orchestral parts, and you can buy books of famous solos for most instruments. This repertoire has little in common with the kind of playing you will be paid for,…
Yes, so do cooks at crappy dinners and bars. This audition is also often unpaid, sometimes called a "working interview". I've known people who have gone through this in the last few years for jobs making just above minimum wage.
Another 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 h…
> if there is a "Competitive Bridge-Engineering
Not really related to job interviews, but West Point used to do a bridge engineering competition (maybe they still do) where you downloaded a software package and had to design a bridge that could withstand the highest load for the smallest cost. It was pretty accessible and kind of fun to mess around with. I never submitted any solutions, but I think the prize was a scholarship.
I've never heard of whiteboarding a chemical reaction mechanism. Usually since most chemists at a comparable 'engineering level' to programmers are phds, a seminar is expected, and the candidate has something ready to go. It's an opportunity for the team to learn something new while assessing the critical thinking skills of the candidate during the q&a
I've witnessed it in the post-seminar lab visits. It bears little resemblance to the "whiteboard interview" from the developer world, but if you're visiting with a faculty member after you present your work, they may ask you to help them understand some piece of your work by drawing out the mechanism. I'll disagree with the GP, though, on its applicability to "real-world" work. When I did chemistry, diagraming out a…
sure, but it's not like the employer tells the prospective employee to figure out a mechanism that is not related to the employee's former work (for example, a reaction recently discovered in the employer's lab, or a general reaction that "all good organic chemists should know" - like "show me how dansihevsky's diene works, and apply it to the synthesis of this molecule that you've never seen before") Hah damn. I don't want to give the chemists ideas.
It kills me that "whiteboarding" has become shorthand for "bad developer interview technique". Meanwhile I'm over here whiteboarding my ass off as a communication tool for complex systems where its much more effective to walk someone through it as you draw it than to present pre-made slides. I love whiteboarding.
Whiteboarding or any way of writing notes/diagrams on paper or on any sharable medium is an extremly good communication tool, no one would say otherwise. Said that, it is ALSO a very bad developer interview technique. Think if anytime you use it to communicate with a team coworker you had to feel like "I must make this good in these next 20minutes or I am getting fired" (with the bonus of not knowing what the whitebo…
Being able to work under pressure is also a skill.
When auditioning, would the applicant know which pieces of music they will be required to perform beforehand? I am assuming that they do, which would make it very different from 'whiteboarding' from a software engineering interview. In software engineering interviews, most of the time the interviewer will try to have prepared questions that the interviewee has NOT seen before. To make it more like an audition, the qu…
I was just reading along here, and thinking that I’d much rather whiteboard for the rest of my life than ever take another orchestral audition, although each of these practices is only loosely related to what you will do on the job itself. I recently switched to software development from a professional career in classical and jazz music. Here’s the view from the performance hall: A top five orchestral audition (the o…
Thanks for sharing your experience. As a bad amateur musician, I've wondered about what it's actually like to pursue a career in music. It's sad that the odds seem to be highly stacked against people who want play classical and/or jazz music professionally.
I live in Pittsburgh where we have a wonderful orchestra. The musicians went on strike this season because their compensation was going to be significantly reduced (after already having suffered cuts recently). I wish I knew what to do to convey a love of this music to others, such that there could be more financial support for orchestras. It seems like the supply of talented musicians far exceeds the demand.
Also, since you're a fan of jazz, I was blessed to hear what would become Phil Wood's last concert. He played here in Pittsburgh while on oxygen -- he called it his "amplifier". Members of the Pittsburgh Symphony joined him as he played selections from "Charlie Parker with Strings". Besides the fact that every solo he played was perfect, he ended the show by telling the story of his musical career (and also, to the surprise of all gathered, announced his retirement from music). He passed away only a few weeks later.
I hope that we can find a way to not only maintain but to expand the richness of these musical genres for future generations. But with the challenges that you've described, I fear that many musicians will not be able to take part of it.
I could not disagree more strongly that university is theory-based. The three-class theory sequence I took was a mildly annoying sideshow. The meat of my university's CS program was in Networks and Distributed Systems, Database Systems, Operating Systems, Programming Languages, Functional Programming, Computer Security, Parallel Computing, Sensing and Perception, Machine Learning, Graphics, Scientific Visualization,…
jeez, what uni is this? I kind of like the sound of it.