Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

It's bizarre to me that you think that whiteboard coding tests "communication", in any way. It's not like a presentation, or anything. It's one-sided combat where someone with a secret tries to get someone who doesn't know the secret to regurgitate the secret, on the spot, while pretending that s/he didn't memorize the secret in advance while cramming a great big "Cracking the Programmer Secret" book to prepare for the entire silly exercise in Kabuki theater.

If you want to test communication skills amongst programmers, I dunno...ask them to write something in coherent English. Or here's a crazy thought: ask them to document some code. I guarantee that 80% of working "rockstar coders" will fail (but not before whining, crankily, about how unfair it is that you would actually make them do such a useless thing, since, y'know...never actually documents anything IRL, dude).

Programmers like whiteboarding because it lets them believe that interviews can be reduced to purely objective functions, and because GooAmaSoftBook does it. They're too scared to deviate from the pack, lest people think they aren't as "elite" as everyone else.

You’d be amazed at how little some otherwise competent people can figure out from first principles in an interview in front of a whiteboard.

I feel like this topic comes up on HN every six months and we all lament the broken state of technical interviewing, and the ardent supporters of all the different styles come in and push their position based on success perceived from anecdotal evidence. I have a hypothesis that hiring a good candidate is mostly luck.

When we view the hiring process in the context of what it actually is, a sales relationship, we realize that the customer (i.e. the employer), is ideally looking to buy services and time from the business (i.e. the employee/contractor). Viewed in this context, we quickly realize that many different things become part of the equation. Think about hiring a contractor for your home. If you happen to understand the job they do, you might be able to assess a the potential contractors previous work, quote and reputation effectively. Most people can't because they generally don't understand what it might take to do a job and have no experience in executing it even if they do. So you either heavily rely on recommendations from others, or go for a lower or higher priced contractor based on your perceived value (cheaper job, w/e the results vs more expensive job and risk mitigation) and hope for the best.

Considering most software development doesn't actually happen at "tech" companies, the reality is most companies are like most people and likely can't properly assess talent no matter what. They essentially get lucky if they get a good candidate or unlucky if they don't. That would lead us to think that maybe the "tech" companies are able to do a better job of it. In essence they do, but not because of their methods. I'd say it's a form of selection bias.

Google became successful and happened to be run by generally smart people technically capable people. As such they were able to attract generally smart technically capable people to work for Google. I'd venture a guess that 90% of people who make it to the live interview stage at Google would be qualified to work there, but since Google has it's pick of the litter they need to create a filtering system somehow. They happened to make it the "whiteboard" interview and similar high achieving Peer companies all tend to do the same thing. It became a thing, and as such all non-high achieving companies followed suit so they can behave like the high-achieving companies. The filter a company like Google applies is only necessary because they have too many candidates. Most companies aren't in a position to apply that filter if they really want talent. So really, they need to get lucky enough to get those who don't interview well with the "tech" company method of interviewing and hope they get some of those prime candidates.

I'm pretty sure the tech talent pool, as with all things in life, follows a Gaussian distribution. If you interview enough people you're bound to find some decent ones, even if they don't actually interview all that well.

Indeed. Or give a talk, or write a design doc, or...so many better options, all of which could be balanced out across a day of interviews.

Think how much you might actually learn about a candidate if your interview process replaced a day of solid whiteboarding with a code review, some pair programming, a session of documenting someone else's code, behavioral interviews, etc. It's almost as if you'd be treating them like a...person!

> What if you consider part of someone's job to be communicating concepts to people, possibly with the help of visual aids and diagrams?

Perhaps it would be more effective to have the candidate whiteboard a concept that they are already familiar with, be it a high-level engineering principle or a system/solution they have built in the past. Attempting to solve a problem you have just been presented with AND communicating the solution effectively is a big ask.