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Hiring Without Whiteboards

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Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#21

Post by XCSme »

pklausler wrote: post #12
wendyshu wrote: 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?

I think discussing the projects would be a better solution. The interviewer looks over his projects and asks questions about them, the applicant explains his thought process behind the decisions made.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#22

Post by Someone1234 »

kanobo wrote: 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.

That only works if the workload is low enough to do with a full time job, potentially out of state.

It is a good idea, but nobody is going to be quitting their current job to be a contractor with a job MAYBE attainable. It remains me a lot of retail seasonal employees who work their butts off to MAYBE get a full time position.

I'd also want there to be a clear decision-point (i.e. it isn't a way to get you to be an indefinite contractor, they make a hire/no hire decision within some set timeframe or at the end of the current work).

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#24

Post by XCSme »

0xFFC wrote: post #17
enjeyw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Keep in mind that people reading your comment might not have that much time and energy either.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#25

Post by vageli »

willcipriano wrote: post #20
pklausler wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

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

Without looking at the commit history, given enough time this is a challenge. I often don't recognize code I wrote myself 6 months ago.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#26

Post by kanobo »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #18
kanobo wrote: 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 g…

True, true. In my poor defense I was imagining all candidates as identical versions of myself in a bubble and never considered taxes or anybody else's lifestyle.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#27

Post by paranoidrobot »

pklausler wrote: post #12
wendyshu wrote: 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?

Code often doesn't stand alone, there's going to be a commit history, there's often going to be comments and issues on other projects.

Ask questions about the code:

- why did you write this in this way

- explain how this works

- if you needed to add X into this, how would you do it

- are there other ways to achieve what you did here, what are the pros/cons of this?

- what would you do differently if you were to re-write this?

- are there any bugs or common issues, how do you go about diagnosing and debugging them? Could you write the code differently to be more resiliant to those issues?

Anyone who wrote that code (assuming it was relatively recently) is going to be able to talk about it sensibly, and be able to dig into the code and show how certain things are done.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#28

Post by kipply »

wendyshu wrote: 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.

Recurse Center has a pretty nice model where they give you a part of a program (small) to bring ahead of time (or you can pick any program you've written) and the interview is going through the code and adding a feature or two.

That kind of interview mitigates the amount of trivia and preparation-gaming while also ensuring that the applicant can solve problems as a team and is a competent programmer. It is cheatable in that one can memorize implementations of some features, though it seems somewhat difficult and not more cheatable than just memorizing a bunch of CS trivia.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#29

Post by vageli »

chrisseaton wrote: post #14
pklausler wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

Likely people making up elaborate lies about code they didn't write. It's trivial to push code of which you are not the author.

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