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Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

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Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

#301

Post by DrBazza »

Yes to whiteboards if they're used correctly.

If the candidate can't explain or solve something simply on a whiteboard, they probably don't understand the problem or domain.

That's not to say that the interviewer might not be a great interviewer in the first place though.

Quote: "Feynman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him, “Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.” Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But he came back a few days later to say, “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don’t really understand it.”"

Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

#302

Post by z3t4 »

I think in images, and always visualize the problem, so I would love doing it on a white-board, I actually find it easier then writing the code itself, and I find it very hard to describe the problem in words. While others think in code, and yet other people think in words. So in order to not dismiss a good candidate, explore how they think about problems. Can they describe it with words ? Can they describe it with code ? Or maybe they can only describe it in pictures !? There are also other ways of thinking. Some people think in shapes, then solves the problem like a puzzle making the shapes fit together. These guys/girls might be on savant level and would have a very hard time passing any traditional interview.

Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

#303

Post by keithnoizu »

I always do horribly on these. I also don't have a degree in computer science so although I can setup a binary search tree, etc. well enough if work demands it I don't have the muscle memory of working with them intensively over and over again to spin out solutions to interview questions.

Once in the workplace however I usually get promoted up pretty quickly. I'm pretty handy with generics and meta programming along with architecture and design patterns, meaning I can turn out more complex systems in much less time than most of my coworkers. But that crap never comes up in the google/microsoft interviews of the world.

Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

#304

Post by jcbrand »

LaserToy wrote: post #99

Principal Engineer from huge gaming company here. White board coding interview are testing only one thing: how well candidate is prepared for it. And here what is wrong with it: The assumption that candidate should spend his/her valuable time preparing for someone's assessment is arrogant. I do understand why Google and Facebook do it (the do other arrogant things), they assume you want to work for them so much you w…

Brute-force, not brood-force. Do you work for Blizzard? ;)

Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

#305

Post by jcbrand »

dqpb wrote: post #176

I think most people that are opposed to coding interviews feel that way because they don't feel confident in their ability to do those interviews well, whereas they do feel confident in their ability to "get work done". Here's the thing though. Let's say you're the one giving the interview to two people who claim to be able to get shit done. One is able to code up a solution quickly and the other struggles, producing…

This doesn't take into consideration how much studying and preparation the person who produced a solution quickly did compared to the person who took longer.

If that person studied much more, then they weren't really "quicker", they were just better prepared.

Perhaps that's still a reason to hire them, but not everyone has time to study lots of programming puzzles before an interview, and this is then less a measurement of speed, and more of preparedness.

It also doesn't take into consideration whether the whiteboard problem being presented is at all relevant to the job being offered.

Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

#306

Post by telltruth »

I wonder how many of these people are actually active coders which gives them authority on opinionating on how to interview developers. VPs (especially Chief XYZs) are typically good sales and marketing guys with engineering background that often can only be described as hopelessly out of date (or more politely "has-beens"). They need to keep their heads out of real development stuff.

I'm also frustrated with how people have developed disdain for anything whiteboarding. Asking leetcode puzzles in interviews is bad. Asking questions from CTCI is worse and amateurish. But... asking to whiteboard a problem that you had to solve on your own job in limited time is good! Interviewing is hard because crafting such questions in a way that it abstracts away minutia of transient technologies but retains essential problem solving is hard. This is exactly why, a right policy for a company is to establish being an interviewer as a privilege that needs to be earned because not even all brilliant programmers are good at it and interviewers must take time to craft good question and show care. When they don't, they turn to leetcode, pick random question and give whiteboarding a bad name.

And no, whiteboarding is not bad. What is bad is asking to do X using MongoDB and RectJS because technologies like that are transient. Specific technical tasks that employees might perform in a given point in time are transient. Ultimately what matters is ability to learn, process and use that to solve a given problem. Ofcourse, unless you are company who does nothing but data driven web forms. In that case, yes, go ahead and ask candidate to do just that.

Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

#307

Post by oblio »

techwraith wrote: post #104
remoteorbust wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

VPE at Eaze here - Clear and respectful communication is one of the most important skills for an engineer to have. If you read the second half of my answer in the article I go into the communication side of things. In my experience there are better ways to evaluate a candidate's emotional intelligence and social skills than asking them to code in front of someone.

I'd say you should stick to your guns - I like your approach. Interviews are inherently adversarial: "are you good enough for us to hire you?", "are you better than the other 5-10-1000 candidates". As a result there's a built-in bias which makes whiteboarding a bad fit.

I've written code on white boards at work, and I've discussed about code on white board with colleagues or managers. It's not the same thing as during interviews. The schedule is never as tight, scrutiny is way laxer and the overall mood is completely different when I'm working with colleagues or even bosses.

I kind of understand why the BigCo's do it (they need a super rigid filter since they have so many candidates), but in their case they could select for people with the best pink leotard on interview day and they'd still get decent programmers, because their companies are in such high demand and they generally already control their markets (software, natural monopolies, etc.) and can afford to pay a ton so the competition would be cutthroat anyway.

Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

#308

Post by mushka »

crsv wrote: post #82
ngngngng wrote: post #48

My most recent interview involved a coding assignment, which I topically don't do, but this one was a very interesting challenge that would make a good blog post afterwards so I did it. What was surprising is the interview not only included going over my code from the assignment, but also whiteboard problems about recursion. I've still never used recursion in my day job. Can interviewers really not gauge technical ab…

You have a software engineering job and you never used recursion of any kind? This strikes me as super odd.

I too never used it. Recursion is usually an inferior solution.

Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?

#309

Post by mushka »

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?

Just talk. Have a conversation. There is no point in trying to put someone outside of his comfort zone. You should take him to the very center ot it, and then see how well he can managd. Any question that the interviewer already knows the answer to is not a good question.
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