A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews
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Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews
#2Here’s a curve ball: has there ever been a study on companies that do be those that don’t do whiteboard interviews and the relative performance of the company or the staff?
Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews
#3Some companies list a take-home assignment as an alternative.
IMO, that's worse than a whiteboard interview. My time is valuable, and I don't want to spend my evenings or weekends on an assignment.
Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews
#4Whiteboard interviews are great, just not for writing code. I want to see how you can communicate a design and have a discussion. So we always gave someone a design problem where there really wasn’t a right way to solve it but lots of ways. Then we asked them to tell us what they are thinking as they go thru it. Some people just can’t communicate their thinking or think on their feet under pressure. It was good at finding that.
I ended up trying not having it with some candidates and later I realized it was a mistake. It would have given me some additional insights into their communication skills I didn’t pickup on otherwise.
Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews
#5Some companies list a take-home assignment as an alternative. IMO, that's worse than a whiteboard interview. My time is valuable, and I don't want to spend my evenings or weekends on an assignment.
Different strokes, take home is way more to my liking and much better at demonstrating non-algo work like UI development.
Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews
#6Some companies list a take-home assignment as an alternative. IMO, that's worse than a whiteboard interview. My time is valuable, and I don't want to spend my evenings or weekends on an assignment.
I find some take-home assignments to be completely reasonable and preferable to whiteboard interviews.
For example, Klaviyo in Boston (no relation, I just interviewed with them at one point) has a take-home assignment listed here [0]. It is simple enough that I can finish it in the same time as phone technical interviews and applies to the company's product and job requirements.
Though I am certain there are companies that have unreasonable take-home assignments.
Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews
#7I interview a lot of candidates and we do whiteboarding - to see how candidates can communicate architecture designs and decisions.
The interviews have made me realise that countless candidates are unable to:
1. Give a high level overview of a product
2. Critique design choices and suggest improvements
3. Communicate well as to what the value of components are to the broader business.
Many of the developers can explain a particular piece of logic very well, others can't even do that. But in an enterprise scenario, we need excellent communicators.
Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews
#8Some companies list a take-home assignment as an alternative. IMO, that's worse than a whiteboard interview. My time is valuable, and I don't want to spend my evenings or weekends on an assignment.
Different strokes, take home is way more to my liking and much better at demonstrating non-algo work like UI development.
Curious: how does it better demonstrate non-algo work? How does the interviewer know that you didn't spend the entire weekend googling how to do it? (Although that may be perfectly acceptable to them.)
Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews
#9Some companies list a take-home assignment as an alternative. IMO, that's worse than a whiteboard interview. My time is valuable, and I don't want to spend my evenings or weekends on an assignment.
For me, it depends a lot on the scale of the assignment. I’ve seen some that would require an entire weekend to complete and others that would take a couple hours.
The latter are pretty reasonable and IMO both more pleasant to complete and a better indicator of eventual performance than whiteboard interviews.
The former seem to mostly measure the candidate’s level of desperation/willingness to be exploited.
Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews
#10Whiteboard interviews are great, just not for writing code. I want to see how you can communicate a design and have a discussion. So we always gave someone a design problem where there really wasn’t a right way to solve it but lots of ways. Then we asked them to tell us what they are thinking as they go thru it. Some people just can’t communicate their thinking or think on their feet under pressure. It was good at fi…
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