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Hiring Without Whiteboards

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Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#121

Post by optimuspaul »

marcinzm wrote: post #46

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 progr…

I agree that take home projects and pair programming are nowhere near ideal, but I think the advantage you mention for the "leetcode" white boarding is one of the main disadvantages. If all you need to do is study these and memorize their solutions then what is it showing us of your actual ability.

I personally when I interview candidates prefer to get to know them and how they think before I even try to understand their ability to problem solve. Knowing the language or algorithms are all easy to learn things. Knowing how to naturally be curious and solve problems is a far more difficult skill to learn and demonstrate, but it is easy to evaluate indirectly.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#122

Post by [deleted] »

choppaface wrote: post #95
bit_logic wrote: post #81

Another tech interview thread. For the side that supports these types of interviews, I've never gotten a good answer to a simple question: in the year 2020, why are we expecting people to write compilable code on a whiteboard? It's just stupid at this point. Even a laptop that boots into some micro linux distro and has nothing but nano open would be better. Or just a fresh install windows laptop with nothing but note…

As somebody who has sadly had to make hundreds of candidates write on a whiteboard, here are problems I’ve run into getting the candidate a laptop: * IT just fails: they’re unwilling to supply it, there aren’t enough, the current laptops on hand are junk, or the default password is wrong. These all happen with HR buy-in and funding. * Recruiting just fails: they “have to move the candidate fast because of a competing…

[deleted]

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#123

Post by leonidasv »

mbil wrote: post #45

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 t…

I hate take-home projects more than I hate whiteboard interviews.

I think the best approach would be giving the candidate a broken app and have they debug it live or in a take-home debug-and-fix or debug-and-improve exercise. Could also have some refactor assignment.

Has any company tried something like this before?

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#124

Post by Ozzie_osman »

leonidasv wrote: post #123
mbil wrote: post #45

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 t…

I hate take-home projects more than I hate whiteboard interviews. I think the best approach would be giving the candidate a broken app and have they debug it live or in a take-home debug-and-fix or debug-and-improve exercise. Could also have some refactor assignment. Has any company tried something like this before?

Yes. I worked at Quora and we had a "practical interview" that was exactly this (it wasn't take-home though).

https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-having-a-practical-int...

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#125

Post by IgorPartola »

One of the most telling questions I ask when interviewing is “what was your favorite or most complicated project you’ve worked on and how did you solve the problems you encountered?” I don’t need the interviewee to show me a perfect implementation of a red/black tree. Hell, I don’t remember it. But I want to know what they found challenging and how they went about solving it. Often times they will give me all the technical details I would have asked for, but in context. I don’t care that you know the exact name of that one function in PHP but if you mention it off hand in relevant context, I will place that much more trust in the fact that you actually used it instead of memorizing it.

Other questions I ask are things like do you work on your own projects and tell me a bit about the tech behind them, what’s your favorite pieces of open source or free software (I work with almost exclusively FOSS stuff though my own work is not FOSS), what do you do for fun, and if we were talking on the phone and I had never made tea, walk me through the process (this is a fun one). Then take them out to lunch if possible and watch how they treat service workers. I think this has so far worked well for everyone involved. At least as far as I know nobody I says yay to has been a bad hire.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#126

Post by marcinzm »

optimuspaul wrote: post #121
marcinzm wrote: post #46

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 progr…

I agree that take home projects and pair programming are nowhere near ideal, but I think the advantage you mention for the "leetcode" white boarding is one of the main disadvantages. If all you need to do is study these and memorize their solutions then what is it showing us of your actual ability. I personally when I interview candidates prefer to get to know them and how they think before I even try to understand t…

>Knowing how to naturally be curious and solve problems is a far more difficult skill to learn and demonstrate, but it is easy to evaluate indirectly.

That's what leetcode used to test and then people optimized for it and now it tests memorization. At scale things work differently than in isolated cases. I've also found that most problem solving interviews really test how well I've seen the problem before and how well I can lie about seeing it before. Interview enough candidates and the good problem solvers will look dumb compared to the ones who simply saw it before and can act like they didn't.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#127

Post by kasey_junk »

tptacek wrote: post #115

What you really want to know is whether the take-home assignment really decides anything, or whether it's subjectively evaluated. Is there a rubric? Or is it the basis of an interview? A lot of take-home assignments are cargo culted; the people offering them don't have much faith in them, and still select candidates based on interviews and resume screens (or "pair programming" projects that are really just multi-hour…

I’ve gotten to the point where it’s simpler than this. Firms get 16 hours to evaluate me. If the take home isn’t a huge component of that I know they’ve cargo-culted it. I won’t do it if they can’t promise that isn’t the case.

I say this as someone who was an extremely early adopter of take home tests and think they are the highest signal filter you can reasonably have in the US.

So many places have added take homes in the worst possible way without removing all the other nonsense. It’s as if orchestras started demanding high pressure auditions and then threw out the results if the person talked a good game in an interview.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#129

Post by dabockster »

pandaman wrote: post #83
madamelic wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>with all the registration, taxation, regulation etc headache this implies! It's not if you are in the US. You will get a 1099 from where you worked, you write it on your 1040 and include the 1099 with your taxes if I recall from when I was an independent contractor for a while. It takes maybe like 10 minutes extra and 1099-ing is incredibly common nowadays (unfortunately) so not a super weird case. And it's not regu…

What if you get a 1099 from another state? Multiple states? Don't you need to file taxes with those states now? (Genuinely curious, I am not a CPA so I really don't know). What if you don't have any other 1099s (so you have to pay self-employment tax just because of that one interview, at least I had once when my moving expenses were paid with a 1099). Not even getting into possible illegal work for the candidates on…

My city considers 1099s as businesses due to some shady contractors in the past. So my local government would try to collect a chunk of any contractor earnings (with that chunk getting huge if you didn't register with them first).

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#130

Post by perl4ever »

matthewowen wrote: post #10
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.

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.

It seems that you and a lot of people look at hiring as a zero sum game, because there can only be one standard. If it doesn't include someone, but changing it to include them would exclude you, then tough cookies. That's a very depressing outlook.
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