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Hiring Without Whiteboards

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Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#151

Post by discordance »

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 don't mind the idea of take home exercises as long as I have an actual chance of getting in.

If i'm really serious about joining a company and the many months/years to come with them, I can probably spare a day to show it.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#152

Post by pdubs1 »

samfisher83 wrote: post #33

Companies like google and facebook are paying 200k for entry level engineers. They aren't going to have any issues getting people to apply even with the whiteboard interviews.

What percentile of entry level devs get this? I'd imagine perhaps the top 10% or top 20%.

I imagine the 50th percentile get something more like 100-150k, which in the bay area, compares to perhaps 60-80k in the middle of the country.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#153

Post by underwater »

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?

I don't understand how take home interviews are being held up as a better solution. They have two major flaws:

They lower the cost for the company to zero. So they can widen their pool, and take a chance on more candidates, with no extra cost incurred for them. If you take this to the extreme – every company asking every candidate to complete a take home – then the result is far worse for candidates.

There is no feedback mechanism for candidates during the process. I can say "you shouldn't spend more than two hours on this" until I'm blue in the face, but candidates think they need to polish far beyond what is reasonable. On occasions where we had a system for capturing progress, I found that most candidates far exceeded the time recommended to them. Some were spending up to six hours. The frustrating thing was the extra time never made a difference to the outcome. I could tell from their initial hour whether they were going to pass.

As a hiring manager I've used them, but work hard to be considerate to the candidate. I'd prefer to design a better in person interview than take the easy route that is disrespectful of candidates' time.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#154

Post by charliebrownau »

Im amazing that no companies are willing to work together to reject

- * "Diversity" (Discrimination) quotas

- * "Affirmative" action

- * Paid time off (Pregnant/sick/etc) - * Income Tax

- * GST/VAT

- * Payroll/wage tax

- * Forced super/retirement funds

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#155

Post by User23 »

Apocryphon wrote: post #148

This is yet another tech interview discussion, so I'd like to highlight a subthread from the one earlier this month: > I'm actually a little scared to leave my current FAANG gig for that exact reason tbh. I'm fairly certain I wouldn't make it back in the door without more leetcode grinding + repeated loops than I'm willing to do at this point in my career. >> I'm in a similar position - a tech lead role at a Big N -…

There's no rule that says you can't apply for more than one role at a given FAANG. It's not like they blacklist you for not getting hired in one role. They know they have an intentionally high false negative rate, you get to try again.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#156

Post by gwbas1c »

I just started working at a company that didn't do any whiteboarding or technical challenges. As far as interviewing me goes, they broke all the "rules" that I used to follow when interviewing candidates at my old job.

So far, so good. They seem to have an attitude of seeing the best in everyone, and everyone seems talented. Maybe I can learn a thing or two from them!

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#157

Post by autarch »

nickwalton00 wrote: post #150
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've had companies straight up pay me for doing a take home project as part of an interview. I think that's the ideal way as it gets rid of the potential for exploitation/excessive burden that can come from take home projects.

This can add a lot of overhead, and some candidates may have jobs that forbid them from accepting outside work.

A good middle ground would be to have the company make a donation to the candidate's choice of nonprofit.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#158

Post by runT1ME »

nsainsbury wrote: post #78
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 would argue the problem is it's not a one-time cost. You pay the cost almost every time you want to change jobs, because leetcode/algorithmic interview questions are so fundamentally different to what we actually do day-to-day as developers. It is very easy to completely forget all about graph algorithms in, say, 3 - 5 years during which time you've been a productive, valuable member of a software development team…

>because leetcode/algorithmic interview questions are so fundamentally different to what we actually do day-to-day as developers.

I mean, maybe hard or esoteric easy questions but I don't think that's true for basic things like 'find the first duplicate' or '-traverse- this graph'. When people rail on whiteboard coding, I think they mean obscure algorithmic questions and not fundamental data structure questions.

I don't expect someone to be able to do Dijkstra's algorithm (or even spell Dijkstra, did I do it right?) but everyone should be comfortable enough with a bit of help doing BFS or working with linked lists, hashmaps, no? Am I crazy here?

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#159

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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…

In the past we had some candidates complain about take-home problems. The primary complaint was that candidates weren't interested in dedicating 4-5 hours of their own time unless they felt that someone from the company was putting in an equal amount of their own time. Some candidates also had suspicions that we were trying to use them for free labor (Not true, we used the same toy problem for every candidate). One candidate even thought they should be able to bill us for their time spent applying (We passed).

Eventually I changed the strategy and offered candidates the choice of the take-home problem or an on-site whiteboard style interview where they solved a subset of the problem in pair-programming fashion with us. Zero people chose the on-site interview. Everyone chose the take-home problem.

No one complained any more after we reframed the take-home problem as the candidate's choice rather than the company's.

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