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Hiring Without Whiteboards

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Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#261

Post by malechimp »

genezeta wrote: post #226

One thing I've been wondering lately about take-home tasks is how everybody complains about time estimates, and yet here's a bunch of "small projects" which someone pretends to have very precisely estimated. Unfortunately, most companies fail to honestly estimate the cost of the tasks they assign for these processes. Many of them because they just don't take into account numerous small tasks that the candidate will n…

I've done this a couple of times. All for German companies in Germany. The last one took me a weekend. They liked it and booked me a ticket for on-site. Where they whiteboarded the hell out of me and rejected me on the basis of not getting the right answer fast enough and using wrong syntax in a couple of statements. And there was not a single question about the take-home project.

After that I just decided I'm not going to put the time and effort in that sh*t anymore. I'm not even going to go out of my way to accommodate interviews in my working hours.

Next time it happened I replied back that I'm not interested. For the record, they wanted a silly automation in AWS and kubernetes. Most of the time would go to setup everything up as my future-employer assumed that I had an AWS account and that AWS is the only cloud that matters. (I work on a different provider daily).

Both times it was automotive-related IT. Dunno if that's something to do with it.

My take-away so far: Whiteboard sucks but at least it respects your time while the take-home proj does not necessarily keeps you from wb and is usually ridiculous to a large extent.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#262

Post by scatters »

IgorPartola wrote: post #125

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 tec…

You're selecting for candidates that either have the kind of memory that lets them recollect those experiences on demand, or can fabulate it. Once word gets out about your interview process candidates will just prepare something ahead of time, as they do for the HR interview already.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#263

Post by fogetti »

borplk wrote: post #135
rainyMammoth wrote: post #86

The issue with LeetCode style interview is that almost EVERYONE can solve those questions after studying a couple weeks/months. The only thing that LeetCode questions predict is if the candidate has been training for LeetCode questions. The fact that Google, Facebook etc still use it as a gatekeeping mechanism makes me believe they want to find cogs that will specifically spend hours studying for it. Making sure that…

The reason companies like Google can and do it is because their funnel of incoming candidates is large enough that they can decide to choose the 'intersection' of many factors combined. Meaning they will filter down to people who trained for LeetCode questions AND they are also otherwise skilled.

Take home assignments can be automated the same way as leetcode tasks actually. So there must be something else to it.

I think people underestimate human nature in this case. It's a known thing that many interviewers just do the interviews for the sake of feeling superior than someone else.

It was another trend in the industry to ask stupid brainteasers like "Estimate how many gas stations there are in Manhattan" until Google banned the whole thing altogether. Google judged that these questions only serve to make the interviewer feel clever and self-satisfied. [0]

It's time to do the same with whiteboard interviews.

[0] https://www.wired.com/2015/04/hire-like-google/

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#265

Post by zerr »

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?

Paid (premium rate) take home tasks is the way to go, after the initial screening.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#266

Post by malechimp »

Trias11 wrote: post #185

Best way to avoid this BS is to be introduced by an established insider to help bypass this.

There. That's it. All this is a far-from-optimal filter for the total strangers. Get a foot in the door with an established insider and you get right to the last interview(s). No WBs, no take-home projects.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#267

Post by dagw »

dudul wrote: post #96
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…

> A major issue is that they require candidates to have free time outside of work to complete them. Just like onsite interviews. Any interview process will require candidates to spend time outside of work. The only way to fix that would be a true, universally recognized certification/diploma that would prove that you can write software, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

Just like onsite interviews

And unlike an onsite interview, I don't have to take time off during working hours to do them.

My mental model is that I'm willing to spend N hours in total for the job application process. I'm happy to spend some of those hours working on a take home problem as long as that is instead of and not in addition to spending those hours doing multiple rounds of interviews.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#269

Post by roland35 »

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…

I think it is also hard to compare different candidates this way, even assuming they both have a similar level of commitment on GitHub. A take home exercise at least allows them to compare the same thing

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#270

Post by C1sc0cat »

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…

I think its writing exact code down instead of good enough pseudo code - that people hate.

WB interviews should be about problem solving not regurgitation of rote learned algorithms

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