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Hiring without whiteboards

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Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#131

Post by clarry »

et-al wrote: post #60
jonasvp wrote: post #25

I'm responsible for hiring developers at our company based in Berlin, Germany, and found it best to have a guided interview about the candidate's work experience and interesting problems that she/he solved. I never understood the whiteboard hazing/CS trivia that are so widely discussed on HN since it seems extremely disconnected from the actual work that's being done. That said, I'm always surprised how many candidat…

> That said, I'm always surprised how many candidates cannot even point to one problem they worked on they found interesting or one solution that they're proud of. It could be that this technique favors people good at telling stories. Personally, I'm a horrible storyteller. If you were to ask me what I did over the weekend, I'll offer some facts like "oh, went swimming in a river and Bob lost his hat, but we found it…

> > That said, I'm always surprised how many candidates cannot even point to one problem they worked on they found interesting or one solution that they're proud of.

> It could be that this technique favors people good at telling stories.

Or people who think they're impressive. I know I would've been able to point out many problems and solutions I found interesting and were impressed with when I was 15. Today, not so much. The more I know, the less impressed I am with myself, and more and more stuff just feels "routine" and nothing special.

It could be that I'm just not impressive. At all.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#132

Post by dexterdog »

pseud0r wrote: post #104
scarface74 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My view is that you can't have competence at a certain level without confidence - unless you're just an easily outsourced code slinger. I'm often at a whiteboard explaining architecture, ideas, etc. How do you do that without confidence and some semblance of emotional intelligence.

There is really no comparison. Explaining architecture, ideas etc to your colleagues has pretty much no resemblance to a whiteboard interview, where you have several people staring at you and judging you. One is a discussion the other is a test, they compare like having a beer with a colleague is like holding a speech in front of a bunch of stranger.

When an interview is not a discussion, but rather a test, it is a bad interview.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#133

Post by tyingq »

ninjakeyboard wrote: post #110

What's with all the whiteboard backlash? I ask simple questions and expect people to be able to write code unaided to express their idea. Not "implement a linked list" or "write quicksort" but basic "You have two arrays - find if a number exists in both arrays" sort of thing, primarily to reason about runtime complexity, and to make sure they can actually write code. If you tell a candidate to prepare, they should be…

I suspect the backlash is mostly because an interview is already stressful. Then, when you ask someone to code with a marker, all of the muscle memory associated with how they usually code is gone...adding to the stress. You may be missing out on good candidates that just don't "whiteboard well".

Of course, some interviewers are better than others, and can manage to do things to make it a reasonable experience. You outlined some of the things that you do that make it seem like you're in that camp.

I'm not sure there's any one-size-fits-all interview technique that is universally better than others. The homework approach seems popular here, but then there are others that are put off by it. Probably the best thing is an interviewer that's smart enough to change gears when they sense the approach isn't really testing the candidate's skill.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#134

Post by collyw »

hasenj wrote: post #114

There is absolutely nothing wrong in principle with whiteboard questions.

I was far better at these straight out of university, as thats the sort of short assignments we got given.

15 years later I am a far better coder (I class myself as a full stack software engineer now) but I haven't needed to implement the sort of solution that they ask for in years (except in interviews).

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#135

Post by clarry »

rimliu wrote: post #121
et-al wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That said, I'm always surprised how many candidates cannot even point to one problem they worked on they found interesting or one solution that they're proud of. It could be that this technique favors people good at telling stories. Personally, I'm a horrible storyteller. If you were to ask me what I did over the weekend, I'll offer some facts like "oh, went swimming in a river and Bob lost his hat, but we found it…

I think many will be able to tell the story if it is a story about something they care a lot about. Also, there is an opinion that good developers are good communicators.

You can be a good communicator without being a story teller.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#136

Post by tluyben2 »

ninjakeyboard wrote: post #110

What's with all the whiteboard backlash? I ask simple questions and expect people to be able to write code unaided to express their idea. Not "implement a linked list" or "write quicksort" but basic "You have two arrays - find if a number exists in both arrays" sort of thing, primarily to reason about runtime complexity, and to make sure they can actually write code. If you tell a candidate to prepare, they should be…

> What's with all the whiteboard backlash?

As always, some companies spoil it for the rest; whiteboards are fine but the crazy Hackerrank kind of interviewing, coding, on a whiteboard, correct algo's you studied in uni 10+ years ago and so on got a lot of people annoyed.

Nothing wrong with having someone sketch an architecture or a brief plan-of-attack on a whiteboard. But demanding someone to write a correct Bailey–Borwein–Plouffe implementation (I read a few months ago someone got that question in an interview; find the nth digit of PI efficiently as you can. How useless.) or something from their brain without a computer is just rather insane imho.

Seeing if they can write code would be actually writing code. Behind a laptop with access to internet and time to do it. Also; previous work.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#137

Post by onion2k »

ninjakeyboard wrote: post #110

What's with all the whiteboard backlash? I ask simple questions and expect people to be able to write code unaided to express their idea. Not "implement a linked list" or "write quicksort" but basic "You have two arrays - find if a number exists in both arrays" sort of thing, primarily to reason about runtime complexity, and to make sure they can actually write code. If you tell a candidate to prepare, they should be…

I think the primary problem with this sort of interview process is that most companies don't hire enough people to discover whether or not it actually works, plus an interview is so much of a multivariate problem that you'll never really know which part of the process is broken if a bad hire gets though. And that's compounded by the fact any false negatives (great candidates who would have fitted in but got rejected) are clearly never going to be discovered.

The problem I have with whiteboard coding in interviews is that there just seems to be better alternatives. Using a computer as other people have suggested, but also just talking to them you can figure out if someone knows how to code. If you ask someone how they'd check if a number is in two arrays you can immediately tell a developer from a non-developer (or an inexperienced developer) by the language they use and the questions they ask. If they mention loops then that's a bad sign. If they start talking about whether or not the arrays are sorted, how big they are, whether you could refactor the array building code to return the data as a object index instead ... then it's clear that the person knows how to code simple things, and all without needing to pick up a marker pen.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#138

Post by badminton1 »

tluyben2 wrote: post #136
ninjakeyboard wrote: post #110

What's with all the whiteboard backlash? I ask simple questions and expect people to be able to write code unaided to express their idea. Not "implement a linked list" or "write quicksort" but basic "You have two arrays - find if a number exists in both arrays" sort of thing, primarily to reason about runtime complexity, and to make sure they can actually write code. If you tell a candidate to prepare, they should be…

> What's with all the whiteboard backlash? As always, some companies spoil it for the rest; whiteboards are fine but the crazy Hackerrank kind of interviewing, coding, on a whiteboard, correct algo's you studied in uni 10+ years ago and so on got a lot of people annoyed. Nothing wrong with having someone sketch an architecture or a brief plan-of-attack on a whiteboard. But demanding someone to write a correct Bailey–…

There is a legal framework for interviews (e.g: EEO).

Probably they didn't like the candidate and they dismissed that person through a question they weren't expected to answer.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#139

Post by discordianfish »

ninjakeyboard wrote: post #110

What's with all the whiteboard backlash? I ask simple questions and expect people to be able to write code unaided to express their idea. Not "implement a linked list" or "write quicksort" but basic "You have two arrays - find if a number exists in both arrays" sort of thing, primarily to reason about runtime complexity, and to make sure they can actually write code. If you tell a candidate to prepare, they should be…

It simply selects for people who can write a simple code unaided in an interview situation while somebody is watching every letter you type. Many people don't have a problem with that, others have.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#140

Post by ealexhudson »

discordianfish wrote: post #139
ninjakeyboard wrote: post #110

What's with all the whiteboard backlash? I ask simple questions and expect people to be able to write code unaided to express their idea. Not "implement a linked list" or "write quicksort" but basic "You have two arrays - find if a number exists in both arrays" sort of thing, primarily to reason about runtime complexity, and to make sure they can actually write code. If you tell a candidate to prepare, they should be…

It simply selects for people who can write a simple code unaided in an interview situation while somebody is watching every letter you type. Many people don't have a problem with that, others have.

I'm not sure that's true (in terms of explaining the backlash against whiteboarding specifically). From the page:

"The companies and teams listed here instead use interview techniques and questions that resemble day-to-day work – for example pairing on a real world problems"

I would contend that if you're doing pair programming with a candidate, you're looking at people writing code in an interview situation while somebody is watching every letter you type.

In fact, I think hacking on actual code is worse than whiteboarding: everyone knows how to use a pen and board, but don't do so frequently. Different candidates being placed in front of the same computer and IDE, however, may be vastly more comfortable or not - they may know the bindings, etc. If they're not the "driver" in the pair, they still have to grok the codebase and the problem quickly.

Whiteboards may be abstract, and people may focus too much on algorithms with them. I don't think that there is much fundamentally different about pairing, and I would have more reservations with pairing personally.

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