A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews • Hacker News Board

Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews

#121

Post by quakenul » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 8:57 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #55

jboy55 wrote: post #44

Its interesting how many of these companies have 'take home' challenges or projects. Even though the companies may say, "This should only take an hour", 99% of the time, it occupies my entire night/weekend, if not in coding but in thought. There's always something more you could do. Its presented as an objective test, but its very subjective, just as much as the whiteboard test. With the whiteboard test, as a candida…

> Also, take home challenges are probably very discriminatory towards older candidates with families. So maybe just as subtle way of age discrimination? I see this sentiment fairly frequently, and TBH, it completely baffles me. I am in my mid 40s. Yes, I don't have nearly as much energy nor desire to spend all weekend doing take-home programming assignments as I did 20 years ago. But if one candidate is willing to do…

It's not a trade-off! We as a species absolutely require people to have kids. Discriminating against those who do is the most fundamantally wrong thing I can think of.

It is what we are here for, if nothing else.

Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews

#122

Post by gav » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 9:05 PM UTC

ppod wrote: post #61

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, take home challenges are probably very discriminatory towards older candidates with families. So maybe just as subtle way of age discrimination? I see this sentiment fairly frequently, and TBH, it completely baffles me. I am in my mid 40s. Yes, I don't have nearly as much energy nor desire to spend all weekend doing take-home programming assignments as I did 20 years ago. But if one candidate is willing to do…

I agree with what you say as-is, but the other side of it is that the company might not be making optimal hiring decisions by doing this discrimination. A 22 year-old can choose to spend a full weekend on an interview task and do a great job, but once hired that doesn't mean they will actually work more hours (though they might). If we assume that once hired both the 20yo and the 40yo will work 40 hour weeks (i'm in…

> Seems like on-site open-book 90 minute real-world problems would be a nice solution.

It is. And it's superior to a take-home test because you know the candidate wrote the code, you know how long it took them, and you can turn it into a pair-programming exercise.

Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews

#123

Post by switchbak » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 9:07 PM UTC

acslater00 wrote: post #71

I ask most candidates to write code on a whiteboard in front of me and I’m not apologizing for it! The problem is usually fairly easy and if the candidate cannot get to a “describe solution in words” milestone then I will guide them to one. After that I ask them to write code. I will also tell them “the code is the part I care about”. The specific competency I am evaluating here is “can you turn thoughts into code”.…

Hiring people is also about portraying your company in a positive light. Your allusions to the TSA security screen, and how you have to be "trained and calibrated" seem to imply a robotic kind of detachment that would probably be very off-putting to me.

Often employers seem to be of the mind that they have the treasure and it's up to them to filter out the best candidates (sellers market I suppose) regardless of how they appear in the process. I would imagine that a lot of brilliant people get turned off by this. Which (oddly enough) is also fine by me - like dating, I'd rather spend my time finding an open minded/humane place to work, and I find hiring practices are often a rough initial proxy for that.

Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews

#124

Post by Scarblac » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 9:09 PM UTC

simplesleeper wrote: post #39

jjav wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, just like like whiteboard coding is completely unrelated to real-world coding, this type of whiteboard design is also completely unrelated to the real-world whiteboard design people do in non-interview settings. How many times has a scenario like this happened to anyone: Your manager pulls you in with no warning into a conference room and asks you to architect on the whiteboard a new product completely unrel…

... You are making a load of assumptions that are wrong. We ask the candidate to describe a system they have recently built. Therefore they should have product context, they are not being tested on inventing whatsoever (unless they are actually doing an impressive con, in which case, they'll have to be extra skillfull). As mentioned below, we give candidates the benefit of the doubt, but quite a lot of candidates are…

Can I just use words to describe it though? Or pseudocode? Short lists of issues that need to be considered in the design, with various options and their pros and cons, in words?

It's the expectation of drawing pictures on a whiteboard that's so strange to me, that's completely alien to the way I think about software. I think in text.

Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews

#125

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

isoskeles wrote: post #116

ummonk wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're testing for their coding process, why do you make them write it out on a whiteboard? Why not provide them a code editor or at least text editor? I like whiteboard interviews, but they should be testing high level design ("describe solution in words / detail in pseudocode"), not coding skills.

How is providing a code editor or text editor different than writing it out on the whiteboard? I do a similar process and don't care if their syntax is exactly correct. I, maybe different from the person you're responding to, don't care if they use exact libraries in the precisely correct way. But I do care that they're able to come up with a plausible solution. At a point, I see people gripe about whiteboard intervi…

[deleted]

Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews

#126

Post by jedberg » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 9:17 PM UTC

kokokokoko wrote: post #120

jboy55 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 'Work Hours' require someone to be oncall 24/7, you can ask that as part of your interview, but you can't infer that from other factors. Yes: "Our job requires you to be on-call 24/7, one week a month, can you commit to that?". No: "You said you didn't have time for the take home test because you have a family. The family will get in the way of 24/7 support" Also yes: "you will be traveling 5 days a week for your…

As someone who has been in this industry for a long time and seen a lot, this still baffles me. Who agrees to being on call 24/7 for a week? Especially when you are getting paid a typical professional salary? It seems absurd. I've always been active after hours and willing to jump in when things happen. But this idea that you are essentially working (since you need to always be somewhere you can start working within…

I've been on call most of my working life. When I worked at reddit, I was on call 24/7/365. The only time I wasn't on call was for the weekend of my wedding.

When I got to Netflix, only being on call one week a month was a drastic improvement. It meant that I could plan my vacations and important family events around not being on call. On the flip side, my family understood if I suddenly got up from dinner to take a call or get out my laptop. My on call schedule was shared with the family so we could all plan accordingly. Sometimes when it was my week and I had something really important, I would ask a coworker to cover that night for me, and then do the same for them in the future.

The salary for the position accounted for this inconvenience, and it wasn't a surprise. Since everyone who does SRE has this same responsibility, it's built into the compensation. Some companies actually give you extra money when you are on call (I hear Google is one of them).

Yeah, it kinda sucks from a family perspective, but it is what it is. As long as you set expectations with everyone around you, it's not that big a deal.

As it turned out at Netflix, since I was the lead, it meant that I was the secondary or tertiary on call at all times, but again, the family knew this, and also, my coworkers knew that if I didn't answer it was because I really really couldn't take the call at that time, and everyone was fine with that. It just rolled up to next person. Only the first on call was expected to answer, all the rest of us were on a "it would be great if you could" basis.

Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews

#127

Post by PeterFBell » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 9:18 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #109

jboy55 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 'Work Hours' require someone to be oncall 24/7, you can ask that as part of your interview, but you can't infer that from other factors. Yes: "Our job requires you to be on-call 24/7, one week a month, can you commit to that?". No: "You said you didn't have time for the take home test because you have a family. The family will get in the way of 24/7 support" Also yes: "you will be traveling 5 days a week for your…

I agree with all of your examples - it is discrimination if an employer says "your family will get in the way of you working off hours." What I find obnoxious, though, is when an employer has standard rules for everyone (e.g. "all prospective applicants must produce a 3 hour at home project as part of the interview process") and then balk at "discrimination" because you'd rather spend your time at your kid's soccer g…

The challenge with substantial take home tests is that they have the potential skew your applicant pool in a number of ways that are not ideal for your business.

Firstly, as a general rule of thumb, the very best developers who are in the highest demand are unlikely to jump through the hoops, so immediately you're filtering out the very best applicants. As a business owner, that's not something I want to do.

Secondly, and equally importantly, you are likely to get more, young financially stable people with less outside of work commitments (including families which naturally correlate with age which in turn correlates with experience).

If you want to over-index on people with less experience and at the same time reduce the number of applications from people for whom the time commitment is problematic (including but not limited to females who statistically take on a disproportionate percentage of child care responsibilities and some members of traditionally under represented minorities) all you do is reduce the likely diversity of talent you might otherwise get to pick from for your dev team.

Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews

#128

Post by tachyonbeam » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 9:18 PM UTC

There are many comments in this thread about whiteboard vs take-home programming challenges. That's a false dichotomy. What I would really like to see is an interview where I am allowed to code on a computer (at the interview) instead of a whiteboard. I would like to be able to write real code, and test it while I'm coding, as I normally do when programming.

Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews

#129

Post by 1e-9 » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 9:19 PM UTC

I completely agree that having candidates solve trivia, puzzles, riddles, and brainteasers on a whiteboard is an extremely poor method of evaluation. Outstanding developers can mentally freeze when asked to solve even fairly trivial problems in front of a critical audience. Having candidates use a whiteboard to illustrate and explain details of projects or problems that they have previously worked is far more productive. You then drill them within their familiar context regarding their design choices and present them with what-if scenarios that might have changed their approach. It is more realistic and it helps put candidates at ease so you can better evaluate their thought processes, enthusiasm, and practices. I cannot recall a real-world situation where a developer had to solve a detailed problem in front of a critical audience. In front of a critical audience, you either know the answer or you say when you can have the answer.

Re: A listing of companies that don't do whiteboard job interviews

#130

Post by thomascgalvin » Sat, Mar 02, 2019, 9:21 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #117

thomascgalvin wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a reason [basic CS algorithms and data structures] are considered the fundamentals in CS, even if they are baked into most languages nowadays. A linked list is such a fundamental piece of technology, and so obvious to anyone that's been working in a language for a while, that I feel it's perfectly acceptable to rule out a candidate who cannot write one. It doesn't have to be perfect, and it doesn't have to…

The linked list is such a fundamental piece of technology that you never have to implement it. I mean, I understand the linked list quite well, but in my multi decade software career, I've probably actually implemented one less than once a decade. So I think it's a very unrealistic interview question, and will sigh quite hard (internally) when asked to implement one in an interview. You just can't please everyone...

I agree, if you implement a linked list in production code, you've almost certainly made a mistake.

My point is that a linked list is such a simple concept that anyone with real programming experience should be able to write a basic implementation.

It's a Shibboleth; I only care about your ability to perform the task because it tells me something else about you.