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Hiring Without Whiteboards

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Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#391

Post by perl4ever »

qchris wrote: post #184
perl4ever wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My former employer, a Fortune 500 company, wouldn't let me volunteer for a globally recognized charity because the boilerplate agreement the charity required volunteers sign, stated that IP created as a volunteer belonged to them, and my employer considered that everything within or outside work hours was theirs. Not that I was volunteering as a programmer anyway. My current employer doesn't have explicit rules that…

I was under the impression that this kind of interpretation of employment contracts was more or less illegal (or, at the very least, unenforceable) in many states (I'm assuming you're US, programming in Fortune 500, so maybe not applicable?). Sort of fits into the same kind vein as certain non-compete clauses, where companies put them in, but they'd be tossed out pretty quickly in court should things actually reach t…

My recollection is there was a compulsory agreement saying you would not do anything of a nature related to your work, or if you did, allow the company to decide if they wanted to claim it.

Also, running side businesses was not allowed.

Of course, the normal thing to do was just ignore the rules, because most likely nobody would notice or care. I explicitly asked for permission because I wanted to see what would happen.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#392

Post by zerr »

mountainboot wrote: post #335

I interviewed with one of the companies on that list a few years back (noredink). They gave a timed hackerrank style coding question as round one (so I guess technically not a whiteboard). I passed that, then I had an interview with an actual person. He asked me vague question, like what is architecture, I started to reply with what design tradeoffs I made on the app I was working on. He literally laughed at me, and…

It is still a whiteboard question according to the definition on the above mentioned github page - which is correct.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#393

Post by GordonS »

fiblye wrote: post #189
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 lot of people in other comments below are criticizing take-home tasks, but honestly, this sounds nice and balanced. I'd much rather have a couple days to think about a problem and a few hours to implement it over having to take time off work, pay to go all the way to your company at a time that works for both of us, and deal with a white board interview. It's a way bigger investment. So long as it's a small, confin…

Despite having a family not much spare time, I also like the take-home approach.

But any time take-home tasks come up on HN, there are always people here complaining about it and even demanding to be paid for their time.

I get that it doesn't suit everyone, but nothing does. Coming up with an approach that works for the company and candidates is really hard - as evidenced by the many, many threads on this subject here on HN.

Perhaps the best compromise would perhaps be to permit the candidate to perform the task there and then or take it home, but this may require more of a commitment from the interviewer, if they then need to additionally devise tasks to be completed in a shorter time.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#394

Post by symlinkk »

pb7 wrote: post #91
nsainsbury wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Small price to pay to get more and more absurdly high paying jobs every 3-5 years. Being a productive, valuable member of a software development team is teaching you things that will set you up for success in higher level roles. You won’t be taken for those roles on Leetcode interview performance alone.

> You won’t be taken for those roles on Leetcode interview performance alone

You’d be surprised.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#395

Post by sethhochberg »

leonidasv wrote: post #143
sethhochberg wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do this at String and Key (and I adopted the process from my prior teams at Digitally Imported. I've posted jobs from both here on HN in the past). Its a one-hour hands-on programing lab via screenshare - a pretty straightforward task of consuming some data from an API, processing it a little, and displaying it. We use Ruby for our work, and ask the same of our candidates in the lab. No handwritten syntax, exotic/…

I'm interested in hearing more. I'm currently in the process of improving my interview approaches — currently a live coding session with a real-world problem involving an internal dataset.

It sounds like you're on the right track. I think the important parts are:

1) It should be a live exercise (at least mostly live). I'm less interested in the end result than how someone got there, and most people chose to narrate their thought process as they work through the exercise.

2) The candidate should be able to work in their own environment. Online assessment tools can be different enough to introduce friction in a timed interview scenario. I'm interested in seeing how fluid a candidate is with the tools they'll use every day.

3) It should have the same expectations as your day-to-day work. Did the editor have a linter configured, and did they use it? Were tests written for the parts of the lab that introduced nontrivial logic? Is there a README? Is it all one git commit, or did they habitually make commits as they worked?

4) The design of the lab should have a decision point - I'm currently using a lab which could be implemented successfully with either a relational database or some kind of cache store. The strongest candidates recognize there are multiple paths and can justify why they chose the one they did.

This works best for reasonably experienced devs who can actually be expected to create something from scratch from a set of requirements on a short time frame. For more junior people, I'd typically give a version of this lab that I completed myself and introduced a couple of bugs into. The task is to fix the bugs.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#396

Post by yoden »

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…

> in the year 2020, why are we expecting people to write compilable code on a whiteboard

I think this is the bad assumption that's causing your confusion. Maybe this happens, but I think it's very uncommon.

The point of using whiteboards is to focus more on algorithms, data structures, and problem solving, not just spitting out code. If you make the applicant write actual code it limits the scope of the questions that can be asked.

So, it's actually beneficial that whiteboards aren't good for writing compilable code, because that's not what you want the applicant to do.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#397

Post by GordonS »

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…

Do you have a few examples of tasks you assigned? I struggle to come up with tasks that I think have the right level of complexity, but which can also be completed in a reasonable amount of time.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#398

Post by twic »

bananaface wrote: post #351
twic wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The deal was that I basically had 6 months to prove myself, and if everyone felt like it was working out (myself included) this would be bumped into full-time with benefits. In the UK, we sort of have this in the form of probation - in most permanent jobs, you don't gain full employment rights until you've done a probationary period, which is usually six months. You get full salary and benefits during that period,…

This seems kinda nuts to me. I don't think I would leave a stable position for a probationary position, or accept one if I had more stable offers. "It's ok, we probably won't use it" - uhh, what? No, that's what legal protection is for. Is it really that common? I'm sure many companies try to hoist this on propsective employees but I'm surprised people accept it.

In the UK, the "probably won't use it" kind of probation is standard. You accept it because you don't get any offers without it.

It really is the case that companies rarely randomly fire people during probation, so employees are fine with it.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#399

Post by jnwatson »

azangru wrote: post #390
jnwatson wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're trying to evaluate a candidate's ability to accomplish something with finite resources. If you allow someone to put additional time into it, you're biasing the results towards the more desperate and less in-demand individual.

- If the more desperate and less in-demand individual writes bad code, or makes poor judgements, you will be able to see it in their submission, won't you? - Whereas if such an individual, because of their desperation or lack of demand, has enough time and motivation to elegantly solve the problem, then what's not to like? I think a greater concern would be that with take-home assignments it's impossible to be sure y…

The programming test is just one aspect of a candidate, in my estimate about a third of the total "score". Take-home exams bias towards evaluating programming ability but bias against other desirable candidate qualities such as experience.

Their desperation to get the job doesn't necessarily carry over to their day-to-day programming. If they take a month to do a week-long task, I would want to know.

In terms of cheating, that can be easily resolved by asking detailed questions about the candidate's submission. It is also helpful to show that you took the time to review it. (There's nothing as frustrating as taking a day for a take home test and getting no response).

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#400

Post by twic »

braythwayt wrote: post #342
twic wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The deal was that I basically had 6 months to prove myself, and if everyone felt like it was working out (myself included) this would be bumped into full-time with benefits. In the UK, we sort of have this in the form of probation - in most permanent jobs, you don't gain full employment rights until you've done a probationary period, which is usually six months. You get full salary and benefits during that period,…

In Ontario, the letter of the law says you can be fired during probation for any or no reason (modulo human rights legislation), but in practice an employer can still be sued for wrongful dismissal if the employer terminates an employee without demonstrating cause. It’s best to have experienced employment law advice when devising any scheme around using probation as a kind of hiring scheme, as opposed to as a last re…

IANAL either, but my understanding is that wrongful dismissal is breach of contract, whereas unfair dismissal is illegal [1]. So if you write this procedure into your contracts, and then follow it, it's not wrongful dismissal. To be unfair, for a probation period of less than two years, it would have to be meet one of the criteria for being "automatically unfair", which are basically about the employer doing illegal things, or be discrimination [2].

I would also be very careful before implementing a scheme like this - as you say, you would want to have it thoroughly checked by legal and HR experts.

[1] https://my.ucu.org.uk/app/answers/detail/a_id/280/~/unfair-d...

[2] https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/work/leaving-a-job/dismiss...

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