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Hiring without whiteboards

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Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#201

Post by lostboys67 »

snissn wrote: post #194
at-fates-hands wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> What's with all the whiteboard backlash? Here's the deal. As a developer, I have about 30 repos out on GitHub with plenty of examples I've done in the last three years. If you want to interview me, then go look at my code first. I have a pretty specific style so all the code is consistent. Go look at my code, dissect it, ask me questions about it, ask me why did this instead of that, why I prefer some library over…

A business wants to hire you to solve business problems. Coding is the manifestation of the solutions. To me the white board session is to understand if you can take new problems and understand them enough to sketch out a solution. As a hiring manager, I'm glad you've written code before, I want to understand on a day to day basis if you can transform business problems into solutions.

exactly the code is just a means to an end ie solving a real world problem

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#202

Post by hyfgfh »

Let's agree Hackerrank sucks. Develop a shity solution in a very limited time, using ES5 and no libraries for JS, waste time parsing your input where the first element means nothing and the other must have the type converted several times....

If you really want to test a candidate, give them unlimited time, a "real problem" and something that they don't know.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#203

Post by driverdan »

muse900 wrote: post #75
nherment wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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…

I've been coding for about 25 years. The last time I had to write any code related to binary trees was in school, 15-16 years ago.

Given enough time and debugging I'm sure I could do it. I'm not going to be successful on a whiteboard though. If I actually had to do it I'd look it up instead of wasting my time figuring it out.

Unless you're interviewing for a position where they'll have to implement binary trees you shouldn't be wasting time asking about code for them. Questions should be relevant to the position.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#204

Post by AlwaysRock »

hyfgfh wrote: post #202

Let's agree Hackerrank sucks. Develop a shity solution in a very limited time, using ES5 and no libraries for JS, waste time parsing your input where the first element means nothing and the other must have the type converted several times.... If you really want to test a candidate, give them unlimited time, a "real problem" and something that they don't know.

Why something that they don't know? (Actually curious)

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#205

Post by driverdan »

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 would not do a project before a basic phone or email interview. They should be screening candidates before sending projects.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#206

Post by logfromblammo »

snissn wrote: post #194
at-fates-hands wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> What's with all the whiteboard backlash? Here's the deal. As a developer, I have about 30 repos out on GitHub with plenty of examples I've done in the last three years. If you want to interview me, then go look at my code first. I have a pretty specific style so all the code is consistent. Go look at my code, dissect it, ask me questions about it, ask me why did this instead of that, why I prefer some library over…

A business wants to hire you to solve business problems. Coding is the manifestation of the solutions. To me the white board session is to understand if you can take new problems and understand them enough to sketch out a solution. As a hiring manager, I'm glad you've written code before, I want to understand on a day to day basis if you can transform business problems into solutions.

At most of the companies I have worked for, the difficult part of my job is taking the pre-existing code that barely works under the old internal proprietary framework and rehabilitating it into the new internal proprietary framework with a bare minimum of new development.

Showing off that I know how to write (or recognize and copy) good code from scratch does not signal for that. I can't tell you how many times I have had to code something that is objectively incorrect because the old version did it that way, and the customer doesn't want the new version to be different.

The problem with the whiteboard interview is that you can't show an old, crufty code base on it, and ask the candidate to sketch out how to implement a simple feature request without overhauling the whole thing to use industry best practices. And you can't show an existing relational database schema that is pathetically ill-designed and ask about a new report for the customer. Those are the sorts of problems businesses have. They don't suck it up and pay the big bucks for a software pro until after the amateurs have already tried fixing it with an Excel spreadsheet or an Access database. And they don't want you to mess up the solution they already have, no matter how much baling wire and duct tape is holding it together.

Not everyone that can write code can also work well within an existing codebase. The only situation in the wild that I would trust to indicate that skill for my company is someone who actively contributes to an open-source project with a lot of other active contributors. A one-person side project that shows off everything you can do all by yourself won't reassure me. In fact, if it's too good, I might be worried that you will want to overhaul working code just because it's really, really ugly, and you can detect multiple code smells when you look at it.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#207

Post by sterex »

whazor wrote: post #190
ciqsteve wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am assuming that you can use pseudocode

Exactly! The above comment assumes that a linter will be run against the core on the white board. Jeez.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#208

Post by hasenj »

Using the presence of whiteboard questions as a metric for interview quality seems rather pointless to me.

Whiteboards questions can be very good or can be very bad or anywhere in between. Just like any interview question in general.

I for one prefer whiteboard questions to generic open ended personal questions.

Good whiteboard questions can quickly assess whether someone knows the basics of programming or not.

Open ended questions only judge one's ability to tell stories.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#209

Post by bogomipz »

passivepinetree wrote: post #196
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…

Do you have any examples of companies that have asked this of you? I'd actually really like to apply; that seems like a fantastic way to gain some experience outside of my daily job.

Zalando, Bloomberg(you won't get to speak to anyone, immediately asked for code), Soundcloud(speak to a recruiter but nobody technical and then asked for a code project before)

These are just off the top of my head, however theres no shortage.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#210

Post by sterex »

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...

Yikes! They'd probably bury me if I used COBOL!
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