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Hiring Without Whiteboards

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Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#411

Post by 908B64B197 »

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'll play devil's advocate and defend whiteboard interviews as compared to take home or online assessments.

Take homes are not very respectful of the candidate's time and, especially if they are not time bound, often leads to a candidate wasting a significant amount of time on these assignments. Plus, there's always the possibility that desperate candidates would cheat and have the assignment done by someone else.

I would only use take homes and HackerRank style quiz for applicants that are from institutions I don't fully trust with quality or applications that are very spammy in nature, i.e from a college/bootcamp that has an abysmal application-to-hire ratio [0].

For candidates from serious institutions I favor a two-step approach: a screening interview with a light coding question and a full whiteboard interview. The screening's purpose is really only to answer questions about the hiring process and check that the candidate can write very simple code by himself when given a trivial problem [1].

Now, a lot of folks do whiteboard interviews wrong. They often expect to get the exact implementation of an algorithm they found in a textbook and for code on the board to compile. This isn't the point of whiteboarding. Doing this only promotes rote memorization. A good whiteboard interview should be a toy problem that can be solved in several different ways by using different strategies or data-structures. The idea is to see how the candidate will break down the problem. Is the candidate able to formulate test cases, write a simple implementation, verify his code and correct the implementation should it fail a test? On the more meta side of things is the candidate able to take feedback and explain why a certain strategy was chosen? Of course it's not representative of real world engineering but it's a good way to peek at someone's ability to debug and reason about programs; these abilities translate well into debugging and design. Especially at the college level, I really can’t make any assumptions on what the candidates know. I’m not judging their knowledge of the standard library of X programming language or the framework-du-jour but their ability to learn it fast.

[0] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/95-engineers-...

[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#412

Post by twic »

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.

There are tax implications, for both employer and employee, to paying the candidate, at least in the UK. It would be quite a lot of headache for not a lot of money.

Donating to charity has tax implications for the company too, but they're much simpler.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#413

Post by AnimalMuppet »

twic wrote: post #321
bob1029 wrote: post #292

I am starting to think the interview is a waste of time. Sure, you want to make sure the person is more-or-less who they claim to be on the surface, but you will never really understand their capability for reasoning with your problems until they are working in your process. One of my earlier jobs dealing with code involved a very brief interview (no whiteboard involved) followed by a 6 month contract offer. The deal…

> 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,…

You'd be setting up a competition between the new hires. That might create something of a toxic work environment.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#414

Post by usgroup »

tchaffee wrote: post #383
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…

> IMO bite the bullet, over hire and then collect the cream based on evaluation That sounds at the least unethical and perhaps illegal in some countries. You're messing with people's lives, their ability to pay their mortgages, support their children, and other commitments they might have. While hiring mistakes sometimes happen, you should not be using firing as a tool to make your hiring more cost effective. And I a…

Applicants should know what the process is; I'm not sure why you'd assume that would be kept from them? It's perfectly normal for hiring / firing sales, traders, and other performance oriented professions.

Nothing forces people to apply ... mortgages, children etc.

It really depends on whether as an employee you want a meritocracy or an easy time. Personally, I wouldn't be adverse to this sort of practice; and companies like Valve do something significantly more extreme.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#415

Post by braythwayt »

twic wrote: post #400
braythwayt wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you’re right about the distinction between wrongful and unfair dismissal, but if I understand Ontario common law correctly, even in cases where the dismissal during probation is not illegal, and even when you have it in writing that the candidate can be dismissed for any or no reason, you may find yourself on the wrong side of a wrongful dismissal judgment and forced to pony up money.

It’s probably easier to structure such a thing as contract-to-permanent, and I suspect this is why there are a lot of such contracts around. Or at least, I have seen a number of such things in Ontario.

And now the counter-example: My brother is the principal Tuba with the National Arts Centre Orchestra. He had to win multiple auditions, resulting in two finalists being selected. Each of them then went and rehearsed and played a concert with the orchestra, they spent some weeks on contract, expenses and compensation paid. They selected my brother.

Full-time job? Nope! He then went on probation, either for a full year or two, I can’t remember. I’m sure he’d laugh at my worrying about 90 day probationary periods.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#416

Post by GordonS »

wildrhythms wrote: post #319
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…

I turned down an offer from a direct competitor company because they tried to funnel me through an automated programming "test". I told them I have years of experience at their competing company whose hiring bar is notoriously high, and they still demanded I take their weird test. The company was Goldman Sachs. Name and shame.

You need to try to see it from the hirer's perspective too.

I don't interview much these days, but I spent several years of my career sifting through CVs and interviewing candidates.

The number of candidates with seemingly impressive CVs and apparent several years of experience, yet whom basically couldn't code, was shockingly high. And when I say "couldn't code", I'm talking "couldn't even fizz-buzz" levels of incompetence.

The fact is that there are many devs out there who coast through jobs, while all the time it's their colleagues who are doing all the work.

I wasted, many, many hours of my life before realising that it was pointless interviewing candidates that couldn't code - asking them to perform a sort of gatekeeper test improved things immensely.

So it might seem insulting to have to perform these entry tests, but unless you already have code publicly available (e.g. on GitHub), you shouldn't take it personally.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#417

Post by pc86 »

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…

Thank you so much for actually naming the company.

Too many times we read someone's experience, which even if only half true, would be horrifying, yet no indication of who the company was.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#418

Post by GordonS »

bananaface wrote: post #409
twic wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can someone else from the UK verify this? Still seems crazy to me. Edit: reading around it seems like they're standard, but have no legal weight regarding termination? I.e. you're entitled to 30 days pay regardless. This seems very weird on all sides.

Also from UK and can confirm that 30-day probation is pretty standard.

In 20 years, I think I've only seen employees terminated during their probation 2 times. They were non-dev roles, and both times it had transpired that they were totally incapable of the job (one had also lied on their CV).

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#419

Post by GordonS »

bananaface wrote: post #359
danjac wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take-home tests are fine in isolation, but if every company does that you'd pretty much be spending all your time doing take-home projects and nothing else. Also many companies will insist on a take home project in addition to everything else, including a whiteboard interview. So you can pour time and effort into this project only to be eliminated further down the line (or just ghosted). It's like they assume applica…

Just look at their GitHub and if it looks good, dive in at the interview to make sure they actually wrote the code. Isolated take-home tests seem ridiculous to me if the candidate has public code available. You're filtering out anyone who likes to avoid duplicated effort.

I don't think you should require GitHub, but if a candidate came to me with projects on GitHub I'd skip all technical aspects of the interview, since they have already demonstrated their technical ability.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#420

Post by nathanaldensr »

kelvin0 wrote: post #358
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…

I've had one such interview go really bad. I am normally a very trusting and confident person, but that interview destroyed me for days. This was for an internship on my first year of uni when I just started learning to code C and C++. The position was for a Junior programmer (which I was). At some point the interviewer asks which I would choose in a project, C or C++ and reasons why. Basically answered that it depen…

I rarely see it talked about just how much ego plays a part in interviewing. In fact, I'd wager it plays one of the biggest parts of the interview process. If you get even one interviewer that is bitter, unhappy, on a power trip, or otherwise a sociopath, you're not getting hired. Many folks hate interviewing candidates; it can put them in a bad mood. They're going to take it out on you because it's safe.
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