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Hiring Without Whiteboards

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Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#41

Post by grogenaut »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #27
pklausler wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-wr…

I had a former coworker re-write a library we had open sourced as their own. They had used the original version at work so knew it well, knew the internals by asking lots of questions while working for performance reasons. They renamed things and changed pointers around to their preference. They did this right before they left and had it on github as their work. They could meet all of your questions. They didn't really write the code, but it was MIT, what can you do.

It was very obviously there as bait for people like you and it was removed as soon as they took a new job. It was never used in production in its "released" form.

I had no problem with the person's abilities to code, but for reasons like this I probably wouldn't work with them again, or hire them as a eng lead or higher.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#42

Post by ransom1538 »

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.

Our interview process is far more advanced.

We place the candidate in a room with a large whiteboard for 15 minutes alone with the lights off. I then walk in with a 6 piece dresser [1] from IKEA (obviously keeping the lights out). I explain to the prospect that this particular dresser is missing one piece - BUT we need the dresser assembled then disassembled and placed back into the box [without anyone seeing]. More than HALF the candidates become violent and demand to see my github account - some even suggest I have a mental issue. I am often able to calm the candidate down - this way we can get into the REAL debate: KOPPANG vs MALMs. Any candidate caught assembling the IKEA dresser is quickly dismissed out of spite. This technique is from Boz at facebook - it is how all* senior principle engineers are screened at FB and the reason everyone codes PHP (but swears they do not).

HR has complained that my techinques are "ridiculous" or borderline illegal - but so far my successful candidates perform, tend to have a solid grasp of typescript and quickly move into senior management.

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/koppang-6-drawer-dresser-black-...

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#43

Post by madamelic »

simonhamp wrote: post #40
crsv wrote: post #38

Here we go again perpetuating the stereotype of the whiney privileged engineer put in a position of mild discomfort by the villainous abusive white board interview boogeyman. I don’t mind whiteboard interview exercises. They’re not great, but they often give a very good and reasonable signal that often has a high corollary to work performance. I think there’s bigger fish to fry in refining fair and objective intervie…

> they often give a very good and reasonable signal that often has a high corollary to work performance Do you have any statistically significant data to back this claim?

There is statistical data saying the opposite: http://chrisparnin.me/pdf/stress_FSE_20.pdf

That whiteboard interviews are actually testing how you perform under stress rather than how good you are at your job.

Additionally, in my opinion, it measures how good the interviewer is. If you get a bad interviewer or even just one in a bad mood, just pack your bags because you aren't getting it.

Whiteboards are incredibly arbitrary in my opinion, if taken alone. If it is part of a complete assessment, ehhhh.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#44

Post by tessierashpool »

matthewowen wrote: post #16
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.

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 pro…

yup. and GitHub's useless for value adds like management, marketing, recruiting, or product skills.

for that matter, GitHub is useless if the projects you contribute to are on BitBucket or GitLab. that contributions graph has a lot of assumptions baked in.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#45

Post by mbil »

This is a great list. Thanks for sharing it.

I actually had the pleasure of interviewing at one of these companies before. They had a take-home project, which was to choose and implement and couple enhancements to a toy app. In the subsequent conversations, we discussed how I approached the problem, details of my design, technical tradeoffs, etc -- all the sorts of things you would expect a professional sw engineer to be able to do on the job. It was challenging but fair, and I was struck by how reasonable the process was. It left a wonderful impression on me.

Take-home projects are not a perfect solution to the interview problem. A major issue is that they require candidates to have free time outside of work to complete them. Personally, though, I'd much rather spend a few hours per application working on projects than countless hours prepping for stressful whiteboarding puzzles. As a developer who prefers to digest problems slowly, I look forward to the demise of on-the-spot whiteboarding interviews.

If you work at a company that subjects candidates to such high-stress algorithmic riddles, and you have the ability to make your process more sane, please consider following the lead of cos on this list.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#46

Post by marcinzm »

The advantage of leetcode is that you study once and then it applies for every job you interview for. Like democracy it's a horrible system except for all the others.

Take home project? There goes 4-12 hours per company that gives you one and sometimes more. Companies have no incentive to cut it down or not give it to even marginal candidates so you'll get a lot more of them than full in-person interviews.

Pair programming? That's basically white boarding with a better white board or, in the remote interview world, just regular white boarding. Sure the problem is more real world, in theory, but then you get issues of knowing the same frameworks, etc. So to do well you need to spend a lot of time beforehand studying their specific frameworks and code bases if they ask you to do an issue on their open source project.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#47

Post by [deleted] »

vageli wrote: post #25
willcipriano wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

[deleted]

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#48

Post by simonhamp »

madamelic wrote: post #35
new_realist wrote: post #3

To a large degree, these look like no-name companies who probably have to resort to this kind of thing to make up for worse pay and benefits as compared to FAANG.

"oh no, this 'no-name company' is _only_ going to pay me $100k+ / year while I live in a low-cost of living area, boo hoo hoo" Scrolling through there are a lot of high-quality companies (Auth0, ASOS, Blue Bottle, Basecamp, Buffer, Canonical, CircleCI... and more and more). Just because Google or Microsoft aren't on the list doesn't mean these are backwoods operations. Those companies don't need to bring in new candi…

/raises hand

And Elvie! (If you make it to ‘E’)

We’re hiring right now :) https://elvie.workable.com

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#49

Post by [deleted] »

kanobo wrote: post #19
matthewowen wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#50

Post by marcinzm »

victor9000 wrote: post #39
vageli wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Which is why the interviewer should ask specific and thoughtful questions about the project, so they can gauge the candidate's level of understanding. This concern could also be addressed by introducing a trial period.

>This concern could also be addressed by introducing a trial period.

Why would I leave a stable well paying job for a job that basically says they don't trust me enough to not fire me in two weeks?

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