More whiteboard coding won’t build you a better team
blog.hackerhires.com
More whiteboard coding won’t build you a better team
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Re: More whiteboard coding won’t build you a better team
#2Heresy!
Re: More whiteboard coding won’t build you a better team
#3[deleted]
Re: More whiteboard coding won’t build you a better team
#4Heresy!
Umm, polite sarcasm, anyone?
The fact of the matter is, the hypothesis that "whiteboard skills == mondo real life developer skillz" is pretty much an unspoken, and utterly unquestioned article of faith out in vast stretches of startupland.
Re: More whiteboard coding won’t build you a better team
#5The best interview experiences I've had have started with whiteboard coding but turned into a discussion about the code, assumptions, requirements, theoretical possibilities vs. practicalities, etc.
The worst have been ones where it was clear the interviewer had pulled questions out of the company's interview playbook and didn't have the depth of understanding to discuss them.
Re: More whiteboard coding won’t build you a better team
#6The key thing is that 'you don't want to hire people to write code'. Code is inventory, code has a cost, code-not-written is what you want (as much as possible).
So you need to hire a developer who knows 'how not to code', 'when not to code', how to write as little code as possible (libraries, reuse and designing things that don't take much code, clean, concise, elegant, and well-structured).
These sort of developers are indeed the best to hire - but hard to find. And, as the article points out, is not what most technical interviews test for.
Re: More whiteboard coding won’t build you a better team
#7"Advanced whiteboard coding" does have its uses:
1. It checks that you still know the basics of what's required for a CS degree.
2. Quite possibly, it also checks your capacity to (re-)learn some things for preparation.
Both of these are good indications of your ability to adapt to a new technical environment.
Re: More whiteboard coding won’t build you a better team
#8That question, and the example in the link really threw me for a loop.
At first I understood the question as described, but then looking at the javascript code I suddenly became lost and frightened. It wasn't until I clicked "run" that I realized the code wasn't working "as is" and needed to be made to work. Then it was just a matter of adding cache to the function (at least that's what I did). I had first read the blog as "this an example of caching" not "this is an example of the starting point for the problem".
I still prefer to not have 1 "golden" question but a list of problems the interviewee can choose from. That way they can find something that matches with areas they might be more famalier with (oh crap, I haven't thought of Fibonacci in awhile so I'll take on this robot-battle-engine quiz)
On an unrelated side note I had some fun making quiz #27 pass assertions but fail the meaning of the test:
for ( var i = 0; i Re: More whiteboard coding won’t build you a better team
#9"Advanced whiteboard coding" does have its uses: 1. It checks that you still know the basics of what's required for a CS degree. 2. Quite possibly, it also checks your capacity to (re-)learn some things for preparation. Both of these are good indications of your ability to adapt to a new technical environment.
I agree with the ability to learn part, but do you need the basics for what's required for a CS degree? I say this as someone who does not have a CS degree, but I also don't know that many places working directly with binary trees and linked lists, though I'll admit I may not have found them.
Re: More whiteboard coding won’t build you a better team
#10semi-serious devils advocacy. I don't know if the below is an argument that is correct but I hope for it to be proven wrong. I am pretty sure that accurately assessing individual capacity/potential is really, really, really hard.
"Google is a very successful technology company. While some of the problems they solve are very challenging and require innovative thinking and research, they have employees with decades of research experience and long publication track records to crack those.
New and seasoned developers will almost certainly have plug-n-chug everyday responsibilities, yet their interview process is still a fearsome battery of computer science questions. Their hiring also produces what is regarded as the most skilled CS workforce in the world and the market rewards them richly for it.
Why shouldn't we emulate this? Isn't it working? Aren't advocates of a disruption of this system essentially saying "Go ahead, relax your standards, what's the worst that could happen"? Is it taking your company 6 months to find a decent employee? Maybe that's about how long it should take because there just aren't that many decent employees."