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The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy

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Re: The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy

#51

Post by ryandrake »

jfasi wrote: post #35

I regularly conduct interviews at one of the more infamous "whiteboard interview" companies. At the end of my interviews I like to take five to ten minutes to answer whatever questions the candidate might have about myself, the company, the process, etc. One time I had a candidate who absolutely bombed the interview asked me a question that expressed a similar sentiment: why do you guys place such a heavy emphasis on…

I got one of these interviewers (but not at one of the big companies that actually do things at scale), and stood my ground.

How would you sort this list? "Use the standard library and move on with my life."

But I want you to show me... "Use the standard library and move on with my life."

But what data structure would you use? "This one, because A, B, and C. It is already provided, debugged, and tested, by my standard library."

How is that data structure implemented? "Doesn't matter. It works and the time I spend not worrying about it I can spend shipping software."

--

It actually worked. I think they respected the pragmatism. I actually went on to help migrate them away from a HORRIBLY BUGGY home-grown container/string library, over to, you guessed it--the library that comes with the language.

Re: The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy

#52

Post by xet7 »

I found this blog post after also writing today about Time Well Spent https://blog.wekan.team/2018/02/time-well-spent/index.html and production setup for Wekan https://wekan.github.io at AWS for thousands of users https://github.com/wekan/wekan/wiki/AWS .

About optimization there is DTrace talks at http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/02/03/talks/ and related HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16303595

I do remember Randal Schwartz talking at Floss Weekly https://twit.tv/floss sometime that in his work he tries to listen developers and ask right questions to see where bottlenecks are. Is there some expensive database query, does something need to be cached, etc.

Re: The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy

#54

Post by junkscience2017 »

ryandrake wrote: post #51
jfasi wrote: post #35

I regularly conduct interviews at one of the more infamous "whiteboard interview" companies. At the end of my interviews I like to take five to ten minutes to answer whatever questions the candidate might have about myself, the company, the process, etc. One time I had a candidate who absolutely bombed the interview asked me a question that expressed a similar sentiment: why do you guys place such a heavy emphasis on…

I got one of these interviewers (but not at one of the big companies that actually do things at scale), and stood my ground. How would you sort this list? "Use the standard library and move on with my life." But I want you to show me... "Use the standard library and move on with my life." But what data structure would you use? "This one, because A, B, and C. It is already provided, debugged, and tested, by my standar…

I often try to get my interviewer to offer comments about standard libs etc...when it is clear that they also have never read the standard sort routine, they will usually want to move the discussion elsewhere rather than accept the reality of their own acumen

Re: The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy

#55

Post by hansmalone »

yanslookup wrote: post #8
maxxxxx wrote: post #2

You practice whiteboard tests to get a job and not to be a better programmer. If it gets you a better paid job it's a win but then you can stop.

I recently joined Blind and mostly follow the compensation discussions. 2 Takeaways: 1) Most of us are incredibly underpaid 2) A common question is when asking how candidates prepared that resulted in offers is "How many problems did you do on leetcode?" I'd never heard of leetcode but it seems if you want an offer from FANG, Uber, Lyft, etc then you put your time in practicing programming problems.

Ultimately I don't think this is what OP is saying. Just that white boarding leetcode/hackerrank algos isn't the best use of time, but I'll respond to the takeaways nonetheless because I have spent a lot of time on them:

1) By what metric? Also, who's we? I am a full-stack engineer and feel properly compensated if not over-payed given my expectations.

2) Leetcode has been extremely helpful. Not just in interviewing, but also in understanding how to have more granular control of space/performance. However, it is not the whole picture and I would point people to the famous coding university github: https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university and further push people to follow research and coders they admire such as Peter Norvig: http://norvig.com/

Re: The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy

#56

Post by oblio »

ryandrake wrote: post #51
jfasi wrote: post #35

I regularly conduct interviews at one of the more infamous "whiteboard interview" companies. At the end of my interviews I like to take five to ten minutes to answer whatever questions the candidate might have about myself, the company, the process, etc. One time I had a candidate who absolutely bombed the interview asked me a question that expressed a similar sentiment: why do you guys place such a heavy emphasis on…

I got one of these interviewers (but not at one of the big companies that actually do things at scale), and stood my ground. How would you sort this list? "Use the standard library and move on with my life." But I want you to show me... "Use the standard library and move on with my life." But what data structure would you use? "This one, because A, B, and C. It is already provided, debugged, and tested, by my standar…

I'd argue that for almost any companies except for the big 10 or so, that's the correct approach. Especially for enterprise software. And even in those big 10, for projects which are not directly tied to the things they do at scale (I doubt the Hangouts Android client needs to reinvent the wheel...), it's still the right approach.

I'm kind of sick and tired of companies writing their own frameworks and languages when they can't really maintain them, long term. Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft can, because they have a different culture and primarily because they have a different focus as well as enough profits to support it. Random Java big-shop can't. Their framework will be nice and shiny the first year and 15 years later you'll be wondering why you're working with the atrocious Struts-1 inspired undocumented internal framework.

Re: The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy

#57

Post by oceanghost »

cdoxsey wrote: post #17
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #10

Seems like the more employers complain about the lack of available labor, the more they ratchet up the pointless interview hazing. It's hard to take their claims of 'no one is available' when they're so capricious in tossing away potential employees.

One thing I've noticed, it's often not the employer at fault but the employees. Engineers reject candidates for extremely pedantic reasons (for example, he used a dict instead of a defaultdict, which some will take as a signal that the developer doesn't know python). I suspect that if you were to interview current employees 50% of them would fail the interview.

The worse a programmer-- the more biting his questions. They'll google some trivia before the meeting to look smart, then reject the candidate to feel good about himself.

Re: The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy

#58

Post by samueldavid »

jfasi wrote: post #35

I regularly conduct interviews at one of the more infamous "whiteboard interview" companies. At the end of my interviews I like to take five to ten minutes to answer whatever questions the candidate might have about myself, the company, the process, etc. One time I had a candidate who absolutely bombed the interview asked me a question that expressed a similar sentiment: why do you guys place such a heavy emphasis on…

so you admit your interview process is broken, and till this day you guys have not found a better way to interview given the problems your company has?

Re: The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy

#59

Post by jfasi »

samueldavid wrote: post #58
jfasi wrote: post #35

I regularly conduct interviews at one of the more infamous "whiteboard interview" companies. At the end of my interviews I like to take five to ten minutes to answer whatever questions the candidate might have about myself, the company, the process, etc. One time I had a candidate who absolutely bombed the interview asked me a question that expressed a similar sentiment: why do you guys place such a heavy emphasis on…

so you admit your interview process is broken, and till this day you guys have not found a better way to interview given the problems your company has?

There's nothing broken about it. If anything, I'd say it's a great success: from the set of people I've seen, the people who don't get hired get rejected because they exhibit real deficiencies across multiple interviewers in areas that are relevant to our work. The people my team and others have hired are consistently capable of doing both the day-to-day work we need done and the once-in-a-career stretch challenges they encounter. They are also independent and don't require months of basic training before they start being useful.

If my comment expresses any frustration it's with people who fail to see the point in preparing for anything more difficult than "can you use the standard library and write a for loop" type interviews and then turn around and complain about not getting hired at selective organizations that do very hard things. And then they go and issue a blanket denunciation of a process that consistently meets organizations' expectations.

Re: The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy

#60

Post by jfasi »

oblio wrote: post #56
ryandrake wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got one of these interviewers (but not at one of the big companies that actually do things at scale), and stood my ground. How would you sort this list? "Use the standard library and move on with my life." But I want you to show me... "Use the standard library and move on with my life." But what data structure would you use? "This one, because A, B, and C. It is already provided, debugged, and tested, by my standar…

I'd argue that for almost any companies except for the big 10 or so, that's the correct approach. Especially for enterprise software. And even in those big 10, for projects which are not directly tied to the things they do at scale (I doubt the Hangouts Android client needs to reinvent the wheel...), it's still the right approach. I'm kind of sick and tired of companies writing their own frameworks and languages when…

> I doubt the Hangouts Android client needs to reinvent the wheel...

This actually touches on an interesting point. My notorious interview company is Google. I'm not familiar enough with the Hangouts Android client to tell you anything about it, but for the sake of argument let's unrealistically assume it's trivial. Imagine you have an organization where some engineers are good enough to work on the Hangouts Android client but not good enough to work on, say, the F1 distributed database.

Internal transfers become crapshoots. Is this person good enough to work on my new, highly complex project? Should I reinterview them to make sure they can hack it? Imagine what this does to the social and cultural stratification. "Oh, those Hangouts guys are nice but they're not that impressive, it's not like they're working on the machine learning or anything." It'd be a nightmare both practically for management and socially for the engineers.

Our philosophy is: all engineers should have the chops to quickly be able to ramp up on whatever project they like. This means rejecting a lot of people, but it also means that two engineers can look at one another across the hallway and immediately know they could swap teams and not miss more than a couple weeks of productivity. When framed this way, I think the interview process is a natural consequence.

Not sure what the culture is at other places, but I hope this is a useful data point.

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