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Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

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Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

#261

Post by jonathankoren »

romaniv wrote: post #69
jonathankoren wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but that's also stupid. All to often it comes down to "Make standup a completly working client server system for this arbitrary problem from scratch in 30 minutes, starting... NOW!" You end up spending all your time dicking around with missed semicolons and looking up library routines and shit like that. Sure, it's all stuff you have to do as part of a job, but it's also all trivial stuff. The last time I had t…

Find a reasonably self-contained problem that doesn't involve too many interactions with the "environment". For example, ask the candidate to refactor an existing piece of code.

Well the interviewee doesn't get to choose do they?

Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

#262

Post by mavelikara »

privacypoller wrote: post #57

All of these interviewing "tools" (or tricks) attempt to be time/cost efficient proxies for doing the damn job, and they all suck. * Whiteboard coding is awesome for software development shops that don't actually own computers or use punch cards to load programs. * Shared coding environments with a time limit works well when you want to double screen for someone who can also diffuse suspicious packages that arrive at…

Following your style of writing:

* Paid projects are appreciated by candidates who are currently unemployed.

Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

#263

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

hobls wrote: post #260
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad workplaces are so common though that it’s a perfectly good heuristic to guess that if a place asks you to do whiteboard questions it’s a bad engineering workplace. You’re not missing much by passing, and the heuristic probably won’t be wrong much.

I guess you think every major tech company is a bad engineering workplace? Seems like a broad brush.

Is it even disputed anymore that the experience of working at the big tech companies is abjectly awful? I mean, you gotta work somewhere and they “are fine” and you might as well try to get paid well, but that’s a far cry from a workplace that stands out as good.

The only place I’ve worked that was “good” instead of “treats people poorly but where else are they going to go” was a small, boutique financial company.

Small companies that are randomly led by non-dummies are the best, but are exceedingly rare. Out of the vast majority comprising the other stuff, it’s mostly all so miserable that you’re doing yourself a favor to skip it unless the pay is some dramatic increase for you or you otherwise have some emergency requiring you to take some job.

Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

#264

Post by philwelch »

stlHusker wrote: post #31
recursive wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interviews are necessarily more stressful than typical work. That's not just a property of whiteboard coding.

"Interviews are necessarily more stressful than typical work. That's not just a property of whiteboard coding." My sister, a pediatric ER nurse would disagree with you. The interviews are largely behavioral and are a breeze. No dummy is wheeled in with head trauma, random "new" diseases aren't invented and asked to be treated, etc. The simple fact of the matter is if hospitals hired in the same way, they would have n…

Hospitals also hire people who went already through an even more rigorous screening process than even exists in our field just to become eligible to be nurses and doctors.

Once you're an RN or an MD with all the appropriate qualifications, assuming you're not outright faking them, they can be reasonably confident that you are, in fact, a competent nurse or physician and move on from there.

We don't have that, and so we have to spend a lot of time making sure that a prospective candidate even has the basic skills and qualifications of a software engineer.

Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

#265

Post by ndesaulniers »

bradenb wrote: post #2

VP of Engineering at Eaze, previously CTO at Getable and engineer at Yammer. No, not at all. Whiteboard interviews test one thing well: How well does a candidate code on a whiteboard. Engineers on my team never have to code on a whiteboard (whiteboards are really bad at running code), why would I make candidates do something that I don't ask the engineers already on my team to do? This comes close, but I think the re…

A team I was on at Google (XLA, the compiler for TPUs) used whiteboards almost daily to express algorithms to each other. Definitely helpful for us, but I can see that just being a single team's dynamic.

No comment on it being an effective interview process.

Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

#266

Post by cableshaft »

KallDrexx wrote: post #21
devy wrote: post #9

Serious question, if whiteboard interview aren't the best or helpful at all, what are the successful/useful alternatives for engineering interviews?

I haven't had the opportunity yet but I really want to take a piece of code from our system, de-optimize it a bit and add some bugs, then give users a unit test around it. Most of what we do as engineers is trying to read code to figure out what it's doing, how to fix it and how to enhance it. Going through real code with a candidate and assessing their ability to understand brand new code (and what questions they as…

In one of the best interviews I had, the interviewer had printed off an actual (undocumented) class in one of their projects (I got the job, so I confirmed it later), then asked me to tell him what it did, and if there was anything I would do to improve it. I think he might have added a couple of logic or syntax issues as well, but I can't quite remember anymore.

I've been on dozens of interviews, and that's the only time I've ever encountered that, but I think it does a really good job representing the job, as that's invariably what I'm going to have to do when you hire me, is sit down and familiarize myself with the code base.

He also asked me a handful of questions, said "Okay I know you know enough to do the job, let's see how much you really know," asked me a bunch of really low level stuff, and proceeded to teach me concepts when I told him I didn't know certain things. I walked out of that interview knowing more than when I walked in, something else that has never happened in all the other interviews I've had (except maybe I learned a new term that I never heard before that I was apparently supposed to regurgitate back because that's what was written down as the answer on HR's answer sheet).

Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

#267

Post by hobls »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #263
hobls wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you think every major tech company is a bad engineering workplace? Seems like a broad brush.

Is it even disputed anymore that the experience of working at the big tech companies is abjectly awful? I mean, you gotta work somewhere and they “are fine” and you might as well try to get paid well, but that’s a far cry from a workplace that stands out as good. The only place I’ve worked that was “good” instead of “treats people poorly but where else are they going to go” was a small, boutique financial company. Sm…

Of course it’s disputed. There are lots of happy employees of tech giants. Any company with thousands and thousands of employees is going to have a wide variety of teams of varying qualities.

(And yeah, the pay makes a difference. Not a lot of places where you can make a few hundred thousand dollars a year.)

Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

#268

Post by cableshaft »

miah_ wrote: post #37
h4b4n3r0 wrote: post #14

Nay, unless the candidate wants the whiteboard. Even Google doesn't mandate whiteboard anymore: you can write your code on the provided Chromebook. Some people choose whiteboard, though, for reasons unknown. I think whiteboard (or a sheet of paper) is reasonable for what it gets used for IRL: for sketching out what you're going to do, by drawing or writing very high level description, but it sucks for everything else…

I did a interview with Google last summer. They didn't use a whiteboard, but instead had me code in a shared GoogleDoc. Pretty similar issue, limited time, somebody staring over your shoulder, not your usual development environment. Even more frustrating when you _know_ they have a web-based IDE for internal software development but make you write code in a GoogleDoc.

Was that an on-site interview or a technical interview over the phone? I did an interview at Google about 7 years ago and that sounds like the Technical Interview.

When they brought me on-site after that, I interviewed face to face with 5 or 6 people in a row (except for a lunch break), and every one of them asked me a two or three questions and then switched to tricky whiteboard problems.

I remember one was 'write a function that draws a 2D skyline from a bunch of 3D buildings', which I got totally stuck on because there's so many possible configurations of heights and widths and how they overlap that complicates it, so I didn't really know how to properly solve it.

I didn't get the job. I thought the experience was interesting at the time, and basically treated it as a free tour of Google and a chance to eat In and Out burger again, but I don't want to go through that grueling exercise again (or spend a ridiculous amount of time prepping for it... as it was I spent a solid two weeks studying for it the first time around), so I've said no to Google recruiters every time they've gotten in touch with me since.

I might have given it one more shot, though, if I were willing to move to Silicon Valley at this point in my life, but I just bought a pretty decent house and I'm not really wanting to give that up to take out a mortgage five times what I have here just to live in a smaller house in the Valley and be able to say I worked at Google.

Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

#269

Post by arcticbull »

In my experience conducting engineering interviews (about 300ish so far) I much, much prefer pair programming interviews in front of a computer with an IDE and access to the internet and standard resources. This most closely resembles how we work together and engineers and gives candidates the best chance to show off their skills. Whiteboarding code is something people almost never do in their professional careers, and as such, you focus on all the wrong things (is that the name of that library method? is that where that semicolon goes? is that best practice?). It's neither fair nor representative.

Of course I have no problem testing architecture and communication ability in front of a whiteboard, as this is much closer to how these things are done in the workplace.

Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

#270

Post by arcticbull »

remoteorbust wrote: post #45
bradenb wrote: post #2

VP of Engineering at Eaze, previously CTO at Getable and engineer at Yammer. No, not at all. Whiteboard interviews test one thing well: How well does a candidate code on a whiteboard. Engineers on my team never have to code on a whiteboard (whiteboards are really bad at running code), why would I make candidates do something that I don't ask the engineers already on my team to do? This comes close, but I think the re…

> Whiteboard interviews test one thing well: How well does a candidate code on a whiteboard. What if you consider part of someone's job to be communicating concepts to people, possibly with the help of visual aids and diagrams? I hate this concept that if it's not typing code into an editor then it's not "real work". I absolutely communicate with my coworkers using a whiteboard and pseudocode. I reject the idea that…

How about testing architecture (and implicitly communication) in front of a whiteboard and programming behind a keyboard?
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