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Hiring Without Whiteboards

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Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#241

Post by asdff »

genezeta wrote: post #226

One thing I've been wondering lately about take-home tasks is how everybody complains about time estimates, and yet here's a bunch of "small projects" which someone pretends to have very precisely estimated. Unfortunately, most companies fail to honestly estimate the cost of the tasks they assign for these processes. Many of them because they just don't take into account numerous small tasks that the candidate will n…

I would never apply for a job that made me do a homework assignment. This is a huge red flag that this employer doesn't value your life outside of work at all.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#242

Post by TrackerFF »

Agentlien wrote: post #215

I live in Sweden and we seem to have a very different interview culture. I've never heard of whiteboards or trivia questions, here. I've only gone to four interviews (across eight years), and been lucky to get an offer each time (three of which I've accepted). They have all been primarily discussions about personal experience, hobby projects, personal interests, would-be responsibilities, benefits, and company cultur…

Norway, too.

Only ever encountered WB questions at one place, and it was a FAANG-type American company with a satellite office here.

Everyone else were just normal interviews, with mostly behavioral questions, and some softball technical questions.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#243

Post by asdff »

tjpnz wrote: post #202
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past we had some candidates complain about take-home problems. The primary complaint was that candidates weren't interested in dedicating 4-5 hours of their own time unless they felt that someone from the company was putting in an equal amount of their own time. Some candidates also had suspicions that we were trying to use them for free labor (Not true, we used the same toy problem for every candidate). One c…

How do you stop people from "getting help" on the take home problems.

Why would you penalize an employee for getting help on a problem? Stack overflow away. Troubleshooting is an essential skill.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#244

Post by asdff »

matthewowen wrote: post #16
wendyshu wrote: post #5

No one enjoys whiteboard interviews but it's not clear that these companies have better alternatives. Many of them do take home projects which are time consuming. I'd prefer the employer look at my GitHub profile as there's plenty of code there already. Furthermore, I'm not a fan of "interviews" in general, I find that more information is transmitted by eating lunch with the team and talking like normal people.

Here's the thing though. It's a lot more effort to look through projects on GitHub and evaluate them. And even if you can, you then have to figure out how to cross compare that and set a consistent bar vs people who you interview because they don't have a GitHub presence. People want hiring processes to be somewhat consistent, and in that world it's really kind of a non-starter to replace tech screens with GitHub pro…

It's so backward to see companies shift to these abstracted whiteboard or homework assignments as some sort of standard, considering standardized testing is now falling out of favor in higher education as it is rarely indicative of actual potential success. It strikes me as lazy, just following a trend unrooted in any empirical data.

Maybe the solution is for companies to hire more thorough managers who are capable of vetting a github profile to see if the candidates skills are relevant to the position, not turn the interview process into a performance.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#245

Post by malechimp »

bit_logic wrote: post #81

Another tech interview thread. For the side that supports these types of interviews, I've never gotten a good answer to a simple question: in the year 2020, why are we expecting people to write compilable code on a whiteboard? It's just stupid at this point. Even a laptop that boots into some micro linux distro and has nothing but nano open would be better. Or just a fresh install windows laptop with nothing but note…

In my (bitter) experience, in the pre-covid days, they had a laptop in the meeting room and you got to choose between it and the whiteboard.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#246

Post by asdff »

mxcrossb wrote: post #61
mjrbrennan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd much rather do a take-home project at my own pace funded by the company, seeing as how my personal GitHub is a barren wasteland (well...it was before I started working for an OSS company).

In the future, when looking at github becomes a standard hiring practice, companies will start going full closed source so that their talent can’t jump ship.

I would love to see a push for more intellectual ownership over the code you contribute to your employer. I should be able to take any snippet I wrote and reuse it with impunity.

This might require engineers unionizing, but it would be a boon to the field. Patterns buried in closed source vaults would be disseminated and innovation would surge. It might usher in a golden age of software if everyone were able to freely share their intellectual ideas with their peers and not have to worry about risking their health insurance and home in the process.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#247

Post by asdff »

pklausler wrote: post #12
wendyshu wrote: post #5

No one enjoys whiteboard interviews but it's not clear that these companies have better alternatives. Many of them do take home projects which are time consuming. I'd prefer the employer look at my GitHub profile as there's plenty of code there already. Furthermore, I'm not a fan of "interviews" in general, I find that more information is transmitted by eating lunch with the team and talking like normal people.

As an interviewer, how do I know that you wrote that code in your GitHub profile?

I would assume the best, then in a week when it is clear that they faked their way in you can just lay them off. If they faked their way in but are a great member of the team going forward and contributing to projects, do you really care as a manager?

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#248

Post by matthewmacleod »

I agree that the cliché whiteboard interview is just awful – I've had my share of terrible ones. However, there is one form of whiteboard interview that I really like – it's where the interview is about system design and architecture rather than coding problem nonsense.

I think the first time I saw this was at Google, where the question was pretty much "We are going to design Google Maps from scratch – what does it look like?". The interview is about evaluating the candidate's ability to ask sensible questions when designing a system, checking that they know how to analyse tradeoffs, and understand where they need to think about issues like performance or scaling.

I liked it so much that I've built it into our own recruitment process for our most recent role – it's a process that we go through a lot, even when making changes to existing systems. We do it as a one-hour long collaborative system design process with a short specification for a system that we want to build. We let the candidate lead the design, and help by providing feedback, discussing any ambiguities, and asking questions about specific areas of concern. It's been really interesting to see how different candidates have approached the process.

(Anecdotally, the biggest indicator of a good candidate so far has been the use of abstraction rather than concrete technologies - i.e. "I would have a queueing system here and an object store there" rather than "I would have Kafka here and push to S3 there").

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#249

Post by asdff »

keanebean86 wrote: post #63
amiantos wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have the interviewee submit repos in which they're the only contributor? But, uh, with a take home project, you _really_ don't know that they wrote the code, either...

Do a take-home project but don't make them write from scratch. Give them a mostly working starter application. Sprinkle in some bugs. Start with easy spelling errors and go all the way to concurrency problems. Ask them to add a few simple features and fix any bugs they find. Bonus points if they find bugs you didn't add intentionally. Good unit tests are also a bonus. Give them a couple days or something. Don't count…

This sounds sadistic to me. I've spent a long time on dumb typos, which become a lot harder to spot when you are stressed and on a deadline. Chances are if you are applying for work, you are probably stressed about not having a job.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#250

Post by pyb »

deliveryboyman wrote: post #80
kipply wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recurse Center has a pretty nice model where they give you a part of a program (small) to bring ahead of time (or you can pick any program you've written) and the interview is going through the code and adding a feature or two. That kind of interview mitigates the amount of trivia and preparation-gaming while also ensuring that the applicant can solve problems as a team and is a competent programmer. It is cheatable…

I'm not too familiar with them, but why does Recurse Center need to interview people for technical positions?

The Recurse Center is a retreat that you attend with other like-minded programmers. I recommend it if you are interested deepening your experience as a programmer, by working on personal projects as part of a helpful community. There is a selection process as mentioned above, but it isn't onerous.
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