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Hiring without whiteboards

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Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#151

Post by lostcolony »

badminton1 wrote: post #149
tluyben2 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most companies avoid that by not giving candidates a reason why they were not hired.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#152

Post by vonmoltke »

badminton1 wrote: post #149
tluyben2 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This point is over-parroted. Anybody can sue (almost) anybody else over (almost) anything in this country. A butthurt applicant is not going to be dissuaded from suing you, if so inclined, just because you gave them an "objective" reason.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#153

Post by vertak »

I work remotely and sometimes interview new potential hires. Does anyone have some suggestions for how I could imitate whiteboard questions without actually having a marker and surface available to me or the candidate? It's a little awkward to ask them to write on a piece of paper and angle their camera so I can see what they're writing! Is there any good software that can emulate this?

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#154

Post by mikulas_florek »

meowlicious wrote: post #145
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...

I guess you can consider yourself lucky, I would not want to work for such company.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#155

Post by badminton1 »

lostcolony wrote: post #151
badminton1 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most companies avoid that by not giving candidates a reason why they were not hired.

Well, if you did relatively fine they might still contact you in the future for other positions.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#156

Post by lostcolony »

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)…

Why is mentioning loops a bad sign? The question is simple, and asks for only checking one value; that's a simple answer that, for one value, takes linear time, which is the best you can do (without assuming the array is sorted, but expecting someone to ask you if the array is sorted turns it into a trick question, rather than a real world one). I mean, yes, I'd prefer them to go to a library call for that, but I wouldn't expect them to infer additional complexity from how I stated the problem.

Sure, if someone were to start asking questions, finding out that we're doing this operation a lot against the same arrays, so it makes sense to rebuild them into a set, or we're doing it against only sorted arrays so we can do a binary search, or whatever, is great...but that's more interview technique, not actual coding skill. You're clearly asking a contrived problem, have provided no additional context (no business requirement is "search two arrays to see if a number exists in both"), so it's not really fair to assume a prospect will treat it as an ambiguous requirement that needs further refinement.

This is really the heart of the issue; you're not testing for basic coding ability, which is what you're thinking you're testing for; your own criteria is testing for whether they assume you're trying to trick them. Talking it out isn't testing for coding ability either; I've met people who could say "You would search through each array to see if you can find the item in question", and then literally could not code that correctly, in their alleged preferred language.

If you want to measure whether someone knows to clarify business requirements, give them a business style requirement. "We have an interface that allows users to provide a list of their favorite foods. We want to provide a way for users to compare their own list of foods with that of a potential friend, and see what they share". Okay. That leaves the underlying data structures up the developer (as they are in the real world), and describes a problem they can ask questions around.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#157

Post by vonmoltke »

runako wrote: post #147
onion2k wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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.

Having never worked with anyone like that, I will have to call BS on this because it is simply too hard to believe, without evidence, that someone can understand this level of detail and not know how to create working code. A parrot cannot engage in productive discussion, and aping speech patterns only goes so far. Plus, if they're so good at aping speech patterns, who says they aren't equally good at aping code patterns?

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#158

Post by ciqsteve »

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…

Whiteboarding itself is a skill. What I learned the hard way:

- There is no insert. If you need to go back and insert a line of code somewhere you must either erase all the code below it to make room (then rewrite said code), or you draw a line from the insertion point to somewhere else on the white board and write the code there. For the former you waste a lot of time. For the later the code quickly becomes hard to follow.

- There is no context driven autocomplete or quick method lookup. If you spend your entire day coding in one language and have done so for the last >3 years you should be fine. If you code in multiple languages and spend time with other tasks (devops for example), you might not realize how much you rely on this.

- The white-boarding process works well (given previous two caveats) if you code in a linear style. If you code iteratively the whiteboard is not your friend.

My recommendation to someone starting the interview process. Go buy a small whiteboard and use it to code solutions to interview questions you find online.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#159

Post by douche »

I haven't used a whiteboard in five years. Some people seem to love them, but I just don't get it - in any situation I might use a whiteboard for, I have more effective tools that I can use instead.

There's nothing like having to pull out your phone and take snapshots of a whiteboard because people can't be bothered to use something persistent.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#160

Post by vonmoltke »

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…

> 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.

So thinking out loud while coding is a job requirement now? I have been an engineer for over 14 years, and a software engineer for 10, and I can count on one hand the number of times I have done that outside of an interview. I collaborate all the time, but almost never synchronously while actually writing code.

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