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Hiring without whiteboards

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Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#281

Post by wilc0 »

nolemurs wrote: post #268
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 absolutely agree that whiteboarding is a skill that requires practice. That said, with a reasonable interviewer, the first couple things you're discussing really don't matter. The trick is to understand that no one cares if you're actually writing working code, and that the important thing is communicating your intentions and process. > There is no insert. This really isn't a problem. If you need to insert a line,…

> The trick is to understand that no one cares if you're actually writing working code, and that the important thing is communicating your intentions and process.

This is absolutely not true. I've interviewed at many major companies (Google, Apple, Snapchat, etc.) and they all say at the beginning "Make sure you have working code". They don't necessarily care about syntax errors or spelling errors, but they absolutely want working code.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#282

Post by lhnz »

ninjakeyboard wrote: post #215
lhnz wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of this is that a lot of interview practices (including whiteboarding) exclude people that suffer from social anxiety. Just because somebody freezes up when being watched and critiqued by an Evaluator, doesn't mean that they are 'copy-and-paste programmers'. There are probably a lot of extremely good engineers who find this style of interview difficult. People that call 'whiteboarding' a skill don't really get i…

"People that call 'whiteboarding' a skill don't really get it. If you have irrational fear over people's judgements and this manifests when you're being interviewed, you can't merely expose yourself to this fear often to lessen it. It is very difficult to change how your mind and body react to uncomfortable situations. " I disagree on a few levels. I can't back anything with data but I'll point to where you can find…

  > I hope that I'm not discriminating against social
  > anxiety but I spent 5 years in toastmaster's
  > throwing myself in uncomfortable situations
  > until I could come out of it.
That is impressive and I believe you, however I don't think exposure therapy is proven to work in all cases for everybody. Either way, I don't think that we should require everybody to have 5 years of practice in whiteboard interviews before they can get a job. That can't be right.

  > Maybe I'm alone in my thoughts but I'm looking
  > for people who will grow.
Perhaps they would like to choose what they spend their time on. Sometimes introverts don't mind being introverted, and don't want to take courses on "how to be the most exciting guy in the room". They like their personality as it is. They might still push themselves to grow, but they choose to grow in the areas that they care about.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#283

Post by wccrawford »

logfromblammo wrote: post #197
badminton1 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 had a company call me up years later based on an old resume. I turned them down, but mainly because I only applied to them because I was desperate (don't like the company) and the job they were offering sounded pretty lame.

I can't imagine it's a very successful tactic, and it probably only happens when they're desperate.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#284

Post by udev »

kelvin0 wrote: post #269

Imagine this. You are interviewing for a job, you walk in a room with 2 people who hand you over a sheet with a few problems. They ask you to write the solutions on the whiteboard, while they wait for you to complete. Not a word is said, they are clicking at their laptops, and staring at the whiteboard, as waiting for the genie to pop out of a bottle. All the while your mind is frozen and stuck in a bad loop. This la…

It is also a cultural thing.

I observe that anglo-saxon peoples teach their kids to voice their concerns, needs, wants, and opinions, and to expect (!) results from this. (Compare how american kids behave at airports, train station, and public places with kids from other countries, e.g. french speaking countries).

This helps them approach situations in life with a healthy dose of self-worth and the baseline state of mind that if something is wrong it's not their fault.

In contrast, many other cultures teach their kids that it is impolite/crude/disrespectful to bother adults with your half-baked thought, or (God forbid) unexpected wants, or complaints.

I come from a culture where you are expected to moderate your verbal output when addressing your superiors (e.g. teachers, boss, etc.). You speak out only when you have something worthy to say.

Example:

I had trouble going to "office-hours" when at university in North-America. I always got the feeling that I am bothering the prof, and it is my duty to study more to understand the material, and I should not take his time when I merely did not understand something.

My anglo colleagues seem to not have such qualms. Their thinking is more along the lines of "I don't understand (not my fault), it is his job to teach me (most likely his problem), he has to explain this better, I pay for tuition after all...".

I am happy to have unlearned some of the above things.

But generally, I find the speak-your-mind-at-the-white-board-while-we-watch interview tailored for cultures where kids are taught to be vocal, and are difficult for equally intelligent people from other backgrounds.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#285

Post by ergothus »

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…

Interesting. I've done a fair number of interviews for my last few companies, and while I've found that whiteboarding isn't terribly useful, likewise I've found that I really do need people to do some coding. I've definitely encountered people that talk a great story but don't have the chops behind a keyboard.

My usual process (which isn't to say it's perfect, but it's a process I regularly edit to address problems I see) is to give a few, simple problems, and have them actually code it on a system.

* I know that the computer and environment are unfamiliar to you, so I expect there to be chopiness and typos * I know that most people are nervous during interviews, so I don't fail people if they freeze on one of the questions or miss a concept * I don't give "trivia" questions - the problems tend to be fairly easy ones that cover your ability to approach basic problems. Example: "here is a nested data structure (like an array of objects). Write a method to pull these sorts of elements out." * I'm actually hoping you'll screw up - I'm far more interested in seeing how you deal with a bug than if you can dash out an algorithm flawlessly. Nonetheless, I keep the questions simple because I want to minimize the impact of nervousness * I inform people they are absolutely allowed to use Google, StackOverflow, etc - I'm trying to mimic the actual work experience as much as I can. I WILL judge people on their searches, but I'm pretty loose - I can only recall one person that I dinged for searching, and that's because they went to about.com and copied the answer there without trying to understand it (and it subsequently didn't work). Usually this ends up GIVING people points, because if they demonstrate comfort with finding solutions, I expect that we can hire them and know they'll improve over time.

Despite this, I still ask a few questions that are purely verbal. I want to see if you are someone that will force your preferences on others or are willing to bend. (I'm not looking for a doormat, but I've never met one, so that's a bit moot) I want to see that you are continuing to learn things, because the skills you have now will just not be the skills we need in a year or two.

but overall - I have to judge candidates based on the limited info I can glean in an interview. Of: * resume * whiteboarding skills * discussion skills * coding skills

...I find the latter to be the best measurement of the options, even allowing that it won't be fully accurate.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#286

Post by wccrawford »

notacoward wrote: post #186
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…

If somebody has been promoted multiple times in programming roles, and especially if they have a visible open-source corpus (not necessarily GitHub BTW), then you know they can code. Making them do it in a highly artificial environment is pointless at best . Other words like "insulting" and "demeaning" also come to mind. Asking people to reason about complexity is great, but that's not the way such interviews usually…

My father often told me that there are 2 ways go get rid of a bad worker. Fire them, or promote them. Eventually, they'll be promoted into a situation where they'll have to be fired.

I don't take "multiple promotions" to mean anything in itself. If they can talk about what they did and why, then I consider that they're probably good at their job. And that's the point of interviews, IMO.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#287

Post by jameshart »

ryandrake wrote: post #225
Thiez wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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......

Even in ASCII you have multibyte sequences to worry about: what's the reverse of CRLF?

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#288

Post by at-fates-hands »

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.

>> To me the white board session is to understand if you can take new problems and understand them enough to sketch out a solution.

Honestly? This should be ferreted out in a screening interview.

As someone who's hired developers both as a manger and a senior dev, you know what's really important to me? Knowing where your head is at as a developer.

What I really want to know is:

1 - When shit hits the fan and you're buried under a mountain of stress, how are you going to handle that? Are you going to fight through it, or just give up?

2 - I want to know if you're open to other approaches to coding? What about other frameworks or tools? Do you believe there is one way to achieve a result, or multiple ways?

3 - Does your code have be perfect on the first try, or do you get something working first and then worry about how sweet the code looks later?

4 - How do you feel about fixing bugs? What if I made you fix bugs for 6 months before you started working on any project, how would you feel about that?

5 - Do you have the courage to stand up and say something if you feel like it will negatively impact a project you're working on?

Knowing how to solve basic coding problems at a whiteboard can't substitute for an impending deadline and tons of work that needs to get done in two days. I'd rather have an average developer who can handle a shit ton of stress and get his job done, then some rock star developer who folds like a lawn chair when things get tough. I want the developer who sees a tough deadline as a challenge, rather than the dev who whines constantly about it. You can't figure that out by standing at a whiteboard. You need to sit down and actually talk to the person to get to that stuff.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#289

Post by adrianratnapala »

tezzer wrote: post #273
kelvin0 wrote: post #269

Imagine this. You are interviewing for a job, you walk in a room with 2 people who hand you over a sheet with a few problems. They ask you to write the solutions on the whiteboard, while they wait for you to complete. Not a word is said, they are clicking at their laptops, and staring at the whiteboard, as waiting for the genie to pop out of a bottle. All the while your mind is frozen and stuck in a bad loop. This la…

I completely froze on a phone interview once. I opened up a co-coding application and was asked to write code to balance a binary tree as a warm-up exercise and I completely froze. Couldn't back out of my head, even with some prompting from the interviewers, and I ended up ending the phone call and writing a note of apology. The painful part is, I used to teach CS-101 and CS-102. I assigned that exact problem to my s…

That was a warm up question?

Had they not heard of Fizzbuzz? Or reversing a string?

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#290

Post by ergothus »

udev wrote: post #284
kelvin0 wrote: post #269

Imagine this. You are interviewing for a job, you walk in a room with 2 people who hand you over a sheet with a few problems. They ask you to write the solutions on the whiteboard, while they wait for you to complete. Not a word is said, they are clicking at their laptops, and staring at the whiteboard, as waiting for the genie to pop out of a bottle. All the while your mind is frozen and stuck in a bad loop. This la…

It is also a cultural thing. I observe that anglo-saxon peoples teach their kids to voice their concerns, needs, wants, and opinions, and to expect (!) results from this. (Compare how american kids behave at airports, train station, and public places with kids from other countries, e.g. french speaking countries). This helps them approach situations in life with a healthy dose of self-worth and the baseline state of…

I recently started teaching a class to grad students, most of whom are foreign-born (China and India mainly). I have a lot more sympathy for my college instructors now that I see it from the other side: If students don't speak, I have very little information on whether they are learning the info (which in turn, reflects how well I'm teaching it). Homework is my main clue, and that involves a delay (plus I have a healthy bias against busy-work homework, so while I give assignments it does not count for/against your final grade).

I believe this is exacerbated by the sorts of cultural differences you highlight - I'm (relatively) loud and brash, many of them are reserved. I have no doubt there are lots of signals of confusion/understanding that I'm missing, but I don't know how to find them either.

I recently got my mid-term evaluations from the students (anonymous) - I was shocked to see many of them spent (or at least claimed, which I have to trust in absence of other data) 11+ hours/week on the work outside of class - triple what I expected. (and the answers formed a believable curve of results, so again, I have to trust it absent other data). I had only one student up until that point say how much time they were spending. Everyone else was silent.

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