If you can solve arbitrarily hard problems while on the spot you must be a stellar candidate from a problem solving perspective. If you can effectively articulate your thought process as well you probably have great communication skills and can handle technical discussion and group problem solving for harder problems. It's gonna weed out a ton of people that can do the job but the guys that rock it will probably be valuable assets.
Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?
331–340 of 370 posts
Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?
#332IMO whiteboard interviews are disadvantageous to shy people. However, that aside, generally in meetings whiteboard could have some benefits if not abused
Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you doing now?
Makin' games, burnin' savings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7MXfg2wt28&list=PLqJcvcLs4C...
Ha! I did that for a year...and thinking about doing it again. I mean, selling my home and moving to say, costa rica, i could stretch my dollar, dev my heart out, and watch all the sunsets my heart desires
Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue that a piece of paper showing that someone attended school and graduated and is licensed to be an ER nurse carries much more weight than a piece of paper showing that I'm allegedly qualified to be a software engineer. I know it's totally anecdotal, but we've all heard horror stories about candidates who couldn't write a for loop; some of us have witnessed these things first hand. And yes, phone screens…
Again, the op stated these things are put there to "show how people react to stress" -- my post was a response to that, there is no re-creation of a stressful environment in the situations I stated. "I know it's totally anecdotal, but we've all heard horror stories about candidates who couldn't write a for loop; some of us have witnessed these things first hand. And yes, phone screens should be filtering out those so…
> The majority of those folks can be screened by one look at a resume
Not a significant enough majority, imo.
Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
I work for a large tech company and don’t know of any company like that with a large number of employees happy with their company.
(I’m making a distinction between the idea that a job “is fine” where one “is happy” merely because the culture is at least not worse than elsewhere while the pay is better vs actually feeling positively about one’s company’s culture and corporate behavior.
For example, my friends who work at Facebook are “happy” with their jobs, mostly because of pay and because they know if they switch to other companies, politics, corporate misbehavior, etc., will just continue. But these same people tell me frequently how sad, upset, soulless, disappointed they regularly feel because of their employer.
That feeling I think is extremely widespread in tech, almost all employers. That’s the only part in my viewpoint that matters for whether someone “is happy” at their job, and it’s that type of bad culture I think can be easily flagged by little stuff, like bad whiteboard interviews.)
Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Incredibly different. I highly doubt a normal engineer is going to be giving a demo to their team with high stakes in the first three or so months. I understand if they're possibly a senior engineer, architect, or lead of some sort because they were probably hired with a plan to spearhead a specific project. I'd say in the average case a new engineer will have enough time to at least break the ice with their new team…
I gave a demo of my intro project after a month to my 100 person org at my last company and I was a new grad. In fact, when I was an intern, all interns did project demos at the end of their internship.
Was a hundred K on the line? Clock ticking? Random subject you couldn't have/hadn't prepared for? :D
Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
I work for a large tech company and don’t know of any company like that with a large number of employees happy with their company. (I’m making a distinction between the idea that a job “is fine” where one “is happy” merely because the culture is at least not worse than elsewhere while the pay is better vs actually feeling positively about one’s company’s culture and corporate behavior. For example, my friends who wor…
I blame the modern attempt to turn software developers into assembly-line workers. With sprints and tasks and momentum and a million tiny cuts that take the innovation out and replace it with anonymous criticism and process over product.
Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps it is trivial, but what's the point? If you can reason what algo to use and reason how to determine which one will be the most efficient of the two without testing them both (or explain the abstraction which allows you to test them both without significant overhead in code), it should be enough.
In theory there should be no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.
That doesnt follow to me. In theory, there is a difderence between theory and practice, because theory simplifies reality into a model with given assumotions, and reality...is reality.
Unless of course you have the infinity gauntlet
Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work for a large tech company and don’t know of any company like that with a large number of employees happy with their company. (I’m making a distinction between the idea that a job “is fine” where one “is happy” merely because the culture is at least not worse than elsewhere while the pay is better vs actually feeling positively about one’s company’s culture and corporate behavior. For example, my friends who wor…
I blame the modern attempt to turn software developers into assembly-line workers. With sprints and tasks and momentum and a million tiny cuts that take the innovation out and replace it with anonymous criticism and process over product.
I largely agree. Modern companies are set up to cargo cult lots of process and pay lip-service to innovation while taking extremely risk-averse and conservative approaches to practically everything they do.
Nobody has any idea what’s going on; nobody has clarity. And when someone does have clarity, middle management is only interested if they can set it up like a battery to harvest credit from. If they can’t, their incentives are usually more aligned with intentionally abusing process to “manage out” innovative people.
Re: Engineering whiteboard interviews: yay or nay?
#340Earlier 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…
The point is that the interview style in question overemphasizes on-the-spot responses. How is prowess in a game of "gotcha" an important indicator of engineering skill?
"Gotcha" is about being adversarial. An adversarial attitude and a high-pressure situation are different concepts entirely.