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Hiring without whiteboards

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Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#221

Post by vinhboy »

akanet wrote: post #34
vinhboy wrote: post #2

I think coderpad.io is the modern day equivalent of a whiteboard. It's nice that you get REPL and a keyboard, but the unnecessary pressure of being watched, critiqued, and timed are all there. My mind just goes completely blank whenever I am put in this scenario. Are we programming or defusing a bomb?

Hi. I'm the guy that made CoderPad. I bootstrapped the product out of nothing because of terrible candidate experiences older purely textual collaborative environments provided. I sincerely believe CoderPad gives you much more room to breathe than many alternatives. There are a few reasons for this: 1. You get to introspect the environment. I've had lots of candidates forget whether certain objects support simple met…

Regardless of how much your software has made me sweat, I still think it's great software. My comment was more about the interview process, not your software. Good job creating it. I wish it was free... Haha...

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#222

Post by zzzcpan »

nostrademons wrote: post #42

It's funny, whiteboard interviews really would be a better discriminator for founders than employees. They test confidence rather than competence (or technically, competence + confidence). The former is incredibly important for founders, but the latter is probably what you care about more for employees. And yet founders almost never do a whiteboard interview, yet it's standard for technical employees...

Well, for a random employee of a random company there is no motivation to not haze people on the whiteboard, it's mostly a power play for them and oversupply of candidates permits it. They really don't care how good of an engineer they hire and how much value he can bring to the team or to the company.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#223

Post by bogomipz »

hocuspocus wrote: post #87
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…

> The whiteboards seems far more respectful of people's time at least. Some companies will happily bring you on site for a full round even though they have no idea whether there is an open position for you (infamous example, you can pass Google's hiring committee and then be told there's no headcount). And you've just wasted one day off. On the other hand, take-home projects can be used in a way that saves everyone a…

>"Some companies will happily bring you on site for a full round even though they have no idea whether there is an open position for you (infamous example, you can pass Google's hiring committee and then be told there's no headcount)."

In practice though this is kind of rare especially for the larger SV companies. I'm not saying it's never happened but that Google incident sounds like an anomaly.

How do take home projects save time if they take between 4 - 8 hours? That's the same time as an onsite takes. The difference being that before a company brings you onsite there has probably been at least a technical phone screen or two so the candidate has ben "qualified" to some extent no?

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#224

Post by ryandrake »

driverdan wrote: post #203
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…

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 s…

Additionally: Nine times out of ten, you shouldn't be implementing the binary tree in the first place. There are already tons of tested, robust libraries out there that will do it a lot better than you can, handling all conceivable edge cases, available in a variety of license flavors. Many languages' standard libraries include support for binary trees.

You want candidates who can work through the buy-vs-build tradeoffs.

Reminds me of when I was asked to implement a filesystem API in C or C++ with file manipulation and path parsing and whatnot. The best answer I can think of is usually "With no weird constraints given (is this an embedded system, for example?) just use boost::filesystem and move on with your life." Not impressed with this answer, the interviewer would continue with "assume you can't use Boost!" Next answer is: "There are a variety of filesystem abstractions already written, far better than I could whiteboard. I'd go through each one and pick the one most suitable to the project." I thought it was a trick question at first. You really DO NOT want candidates who hear that question and launch into writing code!!

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#225

Post by ryandrake »

Thiez wrote: post #144
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 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.

Thank you. A great response to "reverse a string" is "What's the encoding?" If it's anything but ASCII, you're in for a long white boarding session. If the interviewer doesn't know what you're talking about, back away slowly......

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#226

Post by logfromblammo »

toast0 wrote: post #214
logfromblammo wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if you're being facetious or if you're really that naive. No company that I have worked for has ever said, "You know what? Let's look at the resumes of previous applicants, call them up, and see if they are still looking for new jobs." Every vacant position is always filled by direct, active applicants. Even backchannel applicants have to send a fresh copy of their resume to someone, so that it can be ad…

I'll offer a counter amnecdote: I submitted a friend's resume, he was interviewed and my boss liked him, but his boss didn't (I don't know about other feedback). Some time later, we had a new opening with some urgency and my boss asked me to see if he'd like to interview again; he was hired after that round (boss's boss did not interview him)

Many of the usual hiring practices can be bypassed if you already know someone at the company.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#227

Post by toast0 »

onion2k wrote: post #168
lostcolony wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wou…

...that's more interview technique, not actual coding skill. The skill and art of "coding" is in finding solutions to problems, not "writing code". When I interview people I'm looking for someone who can explore problems, ask questions, and find good solutions. If they don't feel like they have enough information I expect them to question things. If they're working on assumptions (like 'what does the array actually l…

The fundamental part of the job being reading your mind?

For every interviewer who asks how to find if a number is in both arrays and is expecting a detailed discussion of he to do a nicer job by not actually having arrays, there's another interviewer who just wanted to see if the candidate can write two loops, leave the loops early when the value is found, and not run the second loop if the first one doesn't have the value; expecting to do all that in five minutes so more complex questions can be asked.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#228

Post by hocuspocus »

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...

> all my open source code is written in java 8 for him to look

That completely defeats the purpose of a small, self-contained assignment like the one you were given. And your code isn't even in Java 7 (no diamonds), I think it was a legitimate remark.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#229

Post by Humdeee »

scarface74 wrote: post #142
dexterdog wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go…

We've had similar experiences. For the vast majority of jobs across all industries, the last deciding common denominator question that seals the deal is "Can I see myself having a beer with this person?"

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#230

Post by canistr »

lj3 wrote: post #33
gedrap wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that this is a proper justification for sending coding projects to everyone who submitted a CV. This is a big imbalance in time investment from both sides and quite disrespectful from the applications point of view.

It's not disrespectful for a company to ask you to write a little code for them. They're just as invested on the time front as you are since they have to read and analyze what you send them. Now, if you were to tell me that nobody ever looked at the test after you sent it in, then it becomes disrespectful. I had several companies do that to me a few months ago. Not that it matters much. I don't think code tests will…

To the people who say spending "4 hours is more like 6-8 hours and it is unreasonable":

- How is this any different than spending an unreasonable amount of time studying balancing binary trees and similar trivial whiteboarding problems?

I'm of the opinion that studying all these variations of the algorithm problems is a bigger time-sink and waste of time than getting into the habit of problem solving a take-home project.

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