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Hiring without whiteboards

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Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#141

Post by tluyben2 »

badminton1 wrote: post #138
tluyben2 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What does that entail? I thought the US was not as strict on law for workers / interviews.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#142

Post by scarface74 »

dexterdog wrote: post #132
pseud0r wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Now that I think about it, I wasn't asked a single programming question when I was interviewed for the job I have now. I was asked architectural, process improvement, soft skill questions. That's probably why I chose the job I have over other offers. It was more of a discussion and by the end of the interview, I was joking around with the hiring manager and said something to the effect of "I'm already assuming I'm going to get the job. When am I going to hear back from you?" He started laughing and said soon.

Another interviewer told me at the end of the interview to submit an application and they can get an offer emailed to me by the end of the day. We did a collaborative white board design session and spent a lot of time just talking.

Either all of the job offers I've gotten have been mostly just discussions or I talk tech so much I can't tell the difference between an interview and a typical day at the office.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#143

Post by drdaeman »

rtpg wrote: post #113
muse900 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the hate comes from unprecedented and hard CS questions asked on the whiteboard. I recently went to an interview that asked me to balance a binary tree on a whiteboard. It can be done, and I can do it. Thing is when you go to interview for that company that has 2 developers(small team, small company) and ask you that kind of question it puts you off thinking that those guys won't be great to work with (arro…

This can also be an education problem. There can be big mismatches in what is easy and hard If you're coming from a more FP background things like flipping a binary tree are silly obvious. If you spend a lot of time with C++, of course you know how to write a linked list with memory management. Python devs are probably way better at slicing and dicing data There's a certain expectation of what's easy and hard, but it…

It's also that coders tend to... err... "offload" memory for the stuff they aren't immediately using on a daily basis, and only remember the general terms and names that would be enough to find and remember the details shall they be required.

Last time I've had to do something with the trees implementation details (IIRC, that was AVL trees) was, like, 5 years ago. Right now, I don't exactly remember anything about AVL trees except for they have that nice O(log n) for lookups, insertions and deletions. Would I need to code them from scratch (or remember their internal workings for any other reason, like debugging some core dump), I'd go find the algorithm description (or particular implementation's source) and do so.

At the same time, last time I've worked with balanced trees was just a few days ago, but that was Erlang's `gb_trees` module that did all the stuff and I just had to freshen my memory on the syntax details.

All I would be able to do on a whiteboard is stare for a minute, trying to remember stuff, then probably say "uh, sorry, I don't remember this stuff - haven't did that in a long while". Yes, that makes me a worse programmer, I guess, but are interviewers actually looking for those who remember everything in their head and write code on whiteboard? Looks like a weird case to me that doesn't have to do anything with reality.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#144

Post by Thiez »

nherment wrote: post #54
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…

We're in Denmark and currently hiring. I'm not sure why there is such extreme hate for the whiteboard. Yes it has plenty of caveats when it comes to actual coding and recruiters should not expect any candidate to write precise code on that medium. I do use the whiteboard for trivial CS questions limited to 5-10 minutes. Think fizzbuzz and string reversal. Candidates have the option to use my laptop (not ideal because…

> I do use the whiteboard for trivial CS questions limited to 5-10 minutes. Think fizzbuzz and string reversal.

Why do people keep saying string reversal is easy? Text is one of the hardest things out there. Unless you expect your programmers to support ASCII only?

Why not reverse a list or an array? That does sound like something that is doable in 5-10 minutes.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#145

Post by meowlicious »

bogomipz wrote: post #12

I would like to see a compilation of companies that aren't requiring a "coding project" as part of their interview process. I much prefer to write on a whiteboard as part of an onsite interview than to do a "coding project" for every single company that "might" be interested in me. My experience lately has been an immediate request to complete a coding project right after speaking to a recruiter but before speaking t…

I am interested in this too. I recently failed netflix code review because I used java 7 instead of java 8 which apparently showed them I don't keep up with new technology (even tough the question asked me to pick any language on jvm.) Other reasons given to me were that i used maven instead of gradle.

https://medium.com/@meowlicious99/my-software-engineer-inter...

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#146

Post by Grue3 »

DigitalSea wrote: post #36

The problem with whiteboards, is they're not reflective of real life. When was the last time you can honestly say you used a whiteboard to solve a programming problem instead of Googling and ending at a StackOverflow question with a great answer? I've never used a whiteboard for programming. I've used plenty of whiteboards for things one level back; planning, prioritising and visualising task related things. The real…

Not whiteboard, but I do doodle on paper to find a solution to a problem all the time. It's silly to assume that the problems that I deal with have already been dealt with by somebody else. Who needs programmers anyway if you can simply Google everything? How can you justify the wages of programmers who can't solve new problems on their own?

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#147

Post by runako »

onion2k wrote: post #137
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)…

> 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

Having worked with people like this, I have to call BS. There are a lot of people with the distinct skill of being able to effectively imitate the speech patterns of actual programmers. Asking questions, engaging in productive discussion, etc. But when faced with an empty editor, they simply cannot produce working code.

If you're already talking about coding a really simple problem like your array example, why not let them use a computer language to express a solution? After those 5 minutes, you can move on to richer parts of the interview confident that you're (probably) not going to hire a total bozo.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#148

Post by deadbunny »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #124
ljlolel wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about just asking the candidate to do the same simple task on a computer that they own?

My office is a satellite of a larger one in Austin; we provide laptops for candidates to use for the "remote" part of the interview, when they interview with someone in Austin. But in general, I think the idea of the whiteboard interview is a chance to see someone "think out loud", to see them reason through a problem. Getting a chunk of source code in an email isn't representative of that. (At worst, they paid someo…

> At worst, they paid someone to do it for them

Which would easily come out at the interview when they fail to answer basic questions about their code.

> at best, you have no idea what their approach was

So? Did you get code that would pass a code review? Did you get code with good commits/history?

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#149

Post by badminton1 »

tluyben2 wrote: post #141
badminton1 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does that entail? I thought the US was not as strict on law for workers / interviews.

Dismissing someone using an objective/concrete criteria such as a failed programming test is not problematic.

On the other hand, if you dismiss someone because "is not a cultural fit" or some other subjective reason, the person can sue you, accuse you of discrimination and challenge you to prove your point over a legal mine field.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#150

Post by pertymcpert »

ori_b wrote: post #57
lj3 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's avoidable. Behavioral questions don't tend to freak engineers out. Neither do questions about their past work.

> Behavioral questions don't tend to freak engineers out. Speak for yourself. I'm far more relaxed when diving into a technical question than when playing a guessing game about what social signalling I'm supposed to be doing at that moment.

You're not supposed to be trying to be someone you're not. If you have to put in that much effort during your day job then you won't be happy. You just need to relax and be yourself, it not only makes everyone more comfortable but it lets you and the company start to evaluate whether or not you're good cultural fits. You'd be pissed off if they mis-represented the culture there during the interview process, and they have just as much right to be pissed if you act completely differently (in a negative way) when you start working.
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