Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is your username a reference to your humanity?
What is that supposed to mean?
I didn't know if it was a reference to a gene id
Hiring Without Whiteboards
111–120 of 471 posts
Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards
#112Another 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…
As somebody who has sadly had to make hundreds of candidates write on a whiteboard, here are problems I’ve run into getting the candidate a laptop: * IT just fails: they’re unwilling to supply it, there aren’t enough, the current laptops on hand are junk, or the default password is wrong. These all happen with HR buy-in and funding. * Recruiting just fails: they “have to move the candidate fast because of a competing…
These are not good reasons and again shows that the company really doesn't care. IT gives a bad laptop? That's fine it doesn't have to be good, it just needs a text editor open. Get a USB drive with a linux distro and boot to it and open nano. Or bring your laptop and stick the USB drive linux distro in there and let them use it. Again there is zero excuse for a company to not have a laptop ready for an onsite interview.
All these companies expect you to write code using a site like hackerrank during the phone screen. And yet they can't have a chromebook open to the exact same site during the onsite? If that's too much, they can't even get a cheap laptop, stick in a USB drive linux distro, open nano and give that during the onsite?
Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really don't understand the idea that take home is somehow more fair or accurate than whiteboards. I've judged and taken both whiteboards and take homes. Take homes are more annoying for the candidate, and in my experience much more subjective from the interviewer. In my experience take home is the absolute worst way to pick a candidate.
When I do a take home I have access to google, StackOverflow, etc. I can spend 15minutes on it, then pause to do something else (while I still sort of think about the problem), get back to it for 30 to 60 minutes, rinse and repeat. Which is exactly how I work in real life. Take homes can actually be compiled and executed against a test suite for correctness. Take homes tend to be more realistic exercises than balanci…
When I interview (and yes, there's whiteboard time), I tell the candidate up front and very clearly, "I will be your Google. I know we don't work in a vacuum"
Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards
#114If I were a large company with money I would simply ask all qualified applicants if they would be willing to work on a small part of a real project as a contractor with the possibility of getting hired. Applicants get paid for their time, productivity is achieved, jobs might be offered, everybody is happy.
Sure - That would neatly eliminate majority of qualified candidates :-) Very few people who are successfully employed would take a risk / have a luxury to forsake their certain employment for an extremely short term contract (with all the registration, taxation, regulation etc headache this implies!) and extremely limited chance of gainful employment. (it's perspectives like these that make me realize how much of a g…
You are making a point that many others have made, and it makes me unhappy to see it yet again.
What you are saying in effect, is that hiring regimes can't be (or ought not to be) designed to include a group that is (commonly) discriminated against, if that discriminates against anyone, particularly the majority.
Implicitly, I see you defining the optimum as where everyone uses the same criteria that are as inclusive as possible, and just shrugging and saying "we're doing our best" when some are left out in the cold completely.
But isn't there an alternative vision where the optimum is employers using different ("diverse") sets of criteria that individually discriminate but create a society where there's a place for everyone?
Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards
#115What you really want to know is whether the take-home assignment really decides anything, or whether it's subjectively evaluated. Is there a rubric? Or is it the basis of an interview? A lot of take-home assignments are cargo culted; the people offering them don't have much faith in them, and still select candidates based on interviews and resume screens (or "pair programming" projects that are really just multi-hour or multi-day interviews).
I have a hard time believing that this many firms have take-home assignments that really matter, and aren't just another hoop candidates (or, maybe, disfavored candidates) are forced to jump through.
Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards
#116Personally, the anxiety of whiteboard “coding as performance art” makes my brain freeze. I see it as a broken process. It certainly selects against me.
I think you can learn more useful stuff about a programmer by showing them a function prototype and asking how to black-box test it. Then show them complete code, and ask them to white-box test it. Test cases or a test plan, depending on scale. Then a discussion of test tools they have used.
The people who can produce quality code for your organization will show up pretty fast.
Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the future, when looking at github becomes a standard hiring practice, companies will start going full closed source so that their talent can’t jump ship.
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…
This is how I get over that hump. Not only do I not work on anything related to my day job, I mostly build things in my free time that aren't really useful to anyone but myself. Sure my company may be able to claim ownership of my Sean Connery themed programming language but will they? What on earth do they plan to do with it?
Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards
#118I am going to kill myself (exaggeration). I have maybe one of the best cv's (I am not saying that, it is feedback from industry) for last year student focused on low-level programming. But I cannot bypass recruiters. Why? because none of them even heard Boost.Beast or anything on my cv. Or any C++ thing I have done as project or my publication. They literally do bunch of find/search on the pdf. And because of that I…
This feedback is well intentioned, so please don't take it as an attack. As much as we'd rather it not be the case, even for programmers writing skills are incredibly important. This comment is contains a few grammatical errors and is quite hard to read - I checked your comment history and many others suffer from the same problem. As some who hires, if I read a job application with this quality of writing, I'd probab…
Very under appreciated point even by native English speakers.
Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards
#119As somebody who has been interviewing recently, the format I've preferred is from TestDome. I've never used leetcode or others but I imagine they're similar. I had 4 coding problems for which I had to pass a set of test cases which were explained from a high level. The first 3 were fairly easy and had time limits of 10 minutes or so. The last one was more involved from a design and functionality perspective and had a limit of 45 minutes. Then, it was followed up by a conversation with a developer where we discussed the problems and approaches. The time commitment was finite and reasonable, and the opportunity to explain my code was appreciated.
Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards
#120Earlier 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.
I think the problem is that for some teams the entire process is some combination of leetcode-style "technical" interviews and then some "culture fit" interviews, without any chance to talk about actual dev work.