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Hiring Without Whiteboards

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11–20 of 471 posts

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#11
post #6
post #2

I am going to kill myself (exaggeration). I have maybe one of the best cv's (I am not saying that, it is feedback from industry) for last year student focused on low-level programming. But I cannot bypass recruiters. Why? because none of them even heard Boost.Beast or anything on my cv. Or any C++ thing I have done as project or my publication. They literally do bunch of find/search on the pdf. And because of that I…

Is your username a reference to your humanity?

What is that supposed to mean?

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#12
post #5

No one enjoys whiteboard interviews but it's not clear that these companies have better alternatives. Many of them do take home projects which are time consuming. I'd prefer the employer look at my GitHub profile as there's plenty of code there already. Furthermore, I'm not a fan of "interviews" in general, I find that more information is transmitted by eating lunch with the team and talking like normal people.

As an interviewer, how do I know that you wrote that code in your GitHub profile?

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#13
post #2

I am going to kill myself (exaggeration). I have maybe one of the best cv's (I am not saying that, it is feedback from industry) for last year student focused on low-level programming. But I cannot bypass recruiters. Why? because none of them even heard Boost.Beast or anything on my cv. Or any C++ thing I have done as project or my publication. They literally do bunch of find/search on the pdf. And because of that I…

This feedback is well intentioned, so please don't take it as an attack.

As much as we'd rather it not be the case, even for programmers writing skills are incredibly important. This comment is contains a few grammatical errors and is quite hard to read - I checked your comment history and many others suffer from the same problem. As some who hires, if I read a job application with this quality of writing, I'd probably dismiss it.

If you're having trouble finding a job, it may be helpful to have someone read over any written material you submit alongside your CV (cover letters etc) just to make sure it's clear and easy to understand.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#14
post #5

No one enjoys whiteboard interviews but it's not clear that these companies have better alternatives. Many of them do take home projects which are time consuming. I'd prefer the employer look at my GitHub profile as there's plenty of code there already. Furthermore, I'm not a fan of "interviews" in general, I find that more information is transmitted by eating lunch with the team and talking like normal people.

As an interviewer, how do I know that you wrote that code in your GitHub profile?

Ask them some questions about it over lunch?

What’s your threat model here? People making up elaborate lies about code they’ve written?

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#15
post #5

No one enjoys whiteboard interviews but it's not clear that these companies have better alternatives. Many of them do take home projects which are time consuming. I'd prefer the employer look at my GitHub profile as there's plenty of code there already. Furthermore, I'm not a fan of "interviews" in general, I find that more information is transmitted by eating lunch with the team and talking like normal people.

As an interviewer, how do I know that you wrote that code in your GitHub profile?

Have the interviewee submit repos in which they're the only contributor? But, uh, with a take home project, you _really_ don't know that they wrote the code, either...

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#16
post #5

No one enjoys whiteboard interviews but it's not clear that these companies have better alternatives. Many of them do take home projects which are time consuming. I'd prefer the employer look at my GitHub profile as there's plenty of code there already. Furthermore, I'm not a fan of "interviews" in general, I find that more information is transmitted by eating lunch with the team and talking like normal people.

Here's the thing though. It's a lot more effort to look through projects on GitHub and evaluate them. And even if you can, you then have to figure out how to cross compare that and set a consistent bar vs people who you interview because they don't have a GitHub presence.

People want hiring processes to be somewhat consistent, and in that world it's really kind of a non-starter to replace tech screens with GitHub profile reviews.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#17
post #13
post #2

I am going to kill myself (exaggeration). I have maybe one of the best cv's (I am not saying that, it is feedback from industry) for last year student focused on low-level programming. But I cannot bypass recruiters. Why? because none of them even heard Boost.Beast or anything on my cv. Or any C++ thing I have done as project or my publication. They literally do bunch of find/search on the pdf. And because of that I…

This feedback is well intentioned, so please don't take it as an attack. As much as we'd rather it not be the case, even for programmers writing skills are incredibly important. This comment is contains a few grammatical errors and is quite hard to read - I checked your comment history and many others suffer from the same problem. As some who hires, if I read a job application with this quality of writing, I'd probab…

I really apricate your feedback. Just one thing you should take into consideration, that is, as ESL I am not going to put that much effort on writing comments on HN to check for every grammatical error. I simply don't have that much time and energy.

I do understand what you say. But that is not the case sadly.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#18
post #4

If I were a large company with money I would simply ask all qualified applicants if they would be willing to work on a small part of a real project as a contractor with the possibility of getting hired. Applicants get paid for their time, productivity is achieved, jobs might be offered, everybody is happy.

Sure - That would neatly eliminate majority of qualified candidates :-)

Very few people who are successfully employed would take a risk / have a luxury to forsake their certain employment for an extremely short term contract (with all the registration, taxation, regulation etc headache this implies!) and extremely limited chance of gainful employment.

(it's perspectives like these that make me realize how much of a grouchy old man I am and have always been - always being a buzzkill by thinking things through next 3 steps! :P)

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#19
post #4

If I were a large company with money I would simply ask all qualified applicants if they would be willing to work on a small part of a real project as a contractor with the possibility of getting hired. Applicants get paid for their time, productivity is achieved, jobs might be offered, everybody is happy.

I have a small child and a full time job. It's really not very feasible for me to make time to do a "real project", paid or not. Especially if I'm interviewing with multiple companies.

Yea, I didn't consider that. My thinking was that the hiring process is such a time suck that the applicant should at least paid for those 'take home tests' and 'in person interviews' everywhere in that list ... but yea I'll go back to the drawing board.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#20
post #5

No one enjoys whiteboard interviews but it's not clear that these companies have better alternatives. Many of them do take home projects which are time consuming. I'd prefer the employer look at my GitHub profile as there's plenty of code there already. Furthermore, I'm not a fan of "interviews" in general, I find that more information is transmitted by eating lunch with the team and talking like normal people.

As an interviewer, how do I know that you wrote that code in your GitHub profile?

"Interesting choice using collections.OrderedDict here, why did you choose that?"
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