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Hiring Without Whiteboards

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Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#271

Post by usgroup »

silasdavis wrote: post #260
usgroup wrote: post #252

It’s a funny cultural thing. Here is a caricature: Hiring managers have a real problem to solve: “how do I hire?”. They don’t have the time to conduct actual experiments and work out what actually relates to better hiring. So they trivialise the solution into some assumption about how the information captured in an interview generalises to overall suitability. They then proceed to defend the process and it’s results…

The ultra darwinian workplace is probably not a fun place to be. Also it sounds implicit in survival that there is some obviously fairer natural law that governs who survives. It's another judgement by someone with similar repeatability issues, albeit a judgement with more observation time (and more collateral damage to everyone else who is in fear of losing their job).

Well less repeatability issues actually ... since you can think about the counterfactual “what would we lose if they weren’t here” and the actual “what did we gain”. This information is available and you don’t need process to extract it.

As far as “darwinian” goes some of us relish a meritocracy and loathe being surrounded by duds. I understand “Valve” to do something just like this but to a greater extent and they are not having problems hiring.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#272

Post by _qulr »

sangli wrote: post #57
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 would rather spend 3-4 hours working on a take home test rather than writing on whiteboard. Last year, I did take home test for 5 different companies and all 5 of them invited me to the next round. I yet to have a successful whiteboarding interview.

But did you get any of those jobs? I wouldn't call being invited to the next round successful if you don't get the job. In fact it's a loss, more lost time for the candidate.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#273

Post by VonGallifrey »

collyw wrote: post #239
justinlloyd wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This past week one of the companies on "who's hiring" sent me three challenges that "would only take 2 hours" before I ever got to talk to a human being or even got a human being responding with an email. This was a fully automated system apparently. "Take this programming test, we'll let you know if you're good enough to talk with a human." Whilst the challenges were not particularly complex, you also had to ensure…

We (the whole developer community) really need to stop responding to such companies. I did one recently after the initial HR person chat. I spent a morning on it as they suggested 2 or 3 hours. But then I was rejected for the most pedantic reasons (2 white space PEP violations), not setting up mocks for testing (that would have doubled the scope of the project). Providing an HTML response rather than JSON when the sp…

I just completed this exact challenge (Yes, for Sennder) and I think their challenge is fine. It is not really difficult or takes much time at all. They didn't seem too strict in their review and I was able to discuss some of the "mistakes" and choices I made in the tech interview. Including some PEP8 violations. Despite these mistakes I passed the tech interview just fine and I just have the CTO interview left.

I don't see how mocks would have doubled the scope of the project. I think I have mocks set up in a few lines of code or so. If your project is so difficult to test or if it is difficult to set up mocks for it maybe there is a serious flaw in your project structure?

> Providing an HTML response rather than JSON when the spec asked for a "page, don't bother about styling".

I don't understand what you mean with this. Did you provide a HTML response or did you provide JSON? I did a super simple HTML response with no styling and that was fine. If you did JSON I could see how they would mark it as a mistake when they clearly asked for a HTML page.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#274

Post by _qulr »

WesternStar wrote: post #90
virtuous_signal wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is statistical data saying the opposite Interesting study and really good discussion on HN at the time, but the opposite of "[Whiteboard interviews] often give a very good and reasonable signal that often has a high corollary to work performance" would be something like "People who do well at whiteboard interviews tend to be worse performers at work." I don't think that's what the study said at all; rather tha…

Also people act as though software is a job without anxiety. There is plenty of anxiety in this job. Sometimes under pressure you really do have to perform or push back and its good to know if people can do it.

> Also people act as though software is a job without anxiety.

Not. All. Anxiety. Is. The. Same.

Ask a firefighter to give a speech in front of 1000 people. This is an entirely different kind of anxiety than running into a burning building. Ironically, it may be the former rather than the latter that makes the firefighter sweat.

Writing code is generally not a performance art. We're not stage performers. Interviews are an unusual situation that aren't anything like our daily jobs. Stress on the job is not the same as interview stress. Work emergencies are not the same as interviews.

We need to take into account human psychology. These factors are all well known, but the tech industry seems to act in deliberate ignorance of humanity.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#275

Post by VonGallifrey »

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…

> 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.

When I interviewed people and gave them a take home assignment I was very confident in my estimate for one simple reason: I completed the tasks myself. We had 4 tasks for this for the 4 different types of jobs we hired for. The "estimate" was just double the time I needed to do the task myself. We got feedback from some of the candidates that our estimate was very good.

If I could always estimate the time AFTER I complete the task instead of before then estimation would not be hard at all.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#276

Post by genericlogic »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #169

We use a 3 step process, sans whiteboard: 1. First interview, the candidate interviews us. What market we serve, what our development processes are, what our technology stack is. If they express interest by being prepared and asking good questions, we send them home with 2. a programming task. Choose 1 of 5 tasks. The tasks are not abstract problems or puzzles, but come out of the designs we've implemented. We ask fo…

A key point in your process is that you have a conversation before the homework phase. The last time I was job hunting I would be given homework without ever having a chance to talk to someone. I did that once, sent my work into an automated system and never heard anything back besides an automated thank you.

I think if I was interviewing using your process I would submit code because I would guaranteed a chance to talk about it with other developers.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#277

Post by red2awn »

rendaw wrote: post #221

I haven't seen portfolios mentioned yet, but that's another option. Pros: do it once, use it at multiple interviews. Cons: more difficult to make sure it's original work, difficult to come up with ideas. I did CV screening and very few people had anything, it's not like a portfolio project needs to take more than 2-3 hours to create. Portfolios are a common requirement in other fields where creating a portfolio is ev…

What kind of portfolio worthy projects take less than 3 hours to create?

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#278

Post by b112 »

unishark wrote: post #192
autarch wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or just offer both options. I certainly wouldn't eliminate the opportunity for unemployed people to get a little cash, just because of contract issues that gainfully employed people might have.

Yes, but...

Now one worries, is this itself a test? Are they judging my desire to donate.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#279

Post by bryanrasmussen »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #169

We use a 3 step process, sans whiteboard: 1. First interview, the candidate interviews us. What market we serve, what our development processes are, what our technology stack is. If they express interest by being prepared and asking good questions, we send them home with 2. a programming task. Choose 1 of 5 tasks. The tasks are not abstract problems or puzzles, but come out of the designs we've implemented. We ask fo…

>1. First interview, the candidate interviews us. What market we serve, what our development processes are, what our technology stack is.

I somehow feel this rewards opinionated developers.

Also right now I'm looking at a couple places because their recruiters called me up and said they were willing to meet my requirements which are basically pay - I don't care about most of these things, if they want me to do stuff and are willing to pay my rate and if they, after looking over my cv believe I can handle their stack, that's it. I don't really have any questions for them.

So I guess you don't have people looking for people for you - you only have people coming in that think your company is special enough that they really really want to be there and are invested about finding out everything just to confirm that commitment on their part is good?

on edit: this of course supposes that 90% of the companies out there are very similar and do not have any problems that are so interesting that I should feel prompted to ask. If I ever applied to the Internet Archive I'm sure I would have things I would like to ask.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#280

Post by anticristi »

I feel a better title could be "Hiring without CS trivia". Whiteboard is the most powerful tool I know to brainstorm high-level ideas quickly, such as timelines, diagrams, mock-ups, etc. What sucks is when the whiteboard is used as IDE and the candidate as a compiler.
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