Whiteboards are MacGuffins for hiring conversations.
Hiring without whiteboards
291–300 of 372 posts
Re: Hiring without whiteboards
#292Imagine 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…
When you get stuck, start talking. You should not be silent at the whiteboard trying to flash out a complete solution all at once. Talk. Even if interviewers are not saying anything or ask you any more questions. There are multiple advantages of talking while writing code at the whiteboard. Firstly, you show the interviewers the way you think and approach the problem. It is as important as actually solving the proble…
I don't find talking and thinking at the same time natural. 'Just think out loud' seems so unnatural to me, I never do it in daily life. I am used to thinking to deep house music not to interviewers staring at me like hungry wolves. Its hard to communicate with someone who already knows the solution to question because you are thinking together and feeding off of each others thoughts like in a normal work situation.
I think the idea of modern open office is built on the same idea that people would be thinking, communicating and collaborating at the same time, but I hate open offices for this precise reason.
Re: Hiring without whiteboards
#293Imagine 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…
People are downvoting this, but the difference in cultures is real (though I wouldn't say it is confined to anglos). But udev might be exposing a case where the "anglo" culture has a genuine advantage.
Engineers really should communicate clearly about technical stuff. People solving complex problems really should concepualise their approaches clearly, ideally so that can be expressed in words. People really should reach out for help when blocked.
And if Anglos find it easier to do those things, then good on 'em.
Re: Hiring without whiteboards
#294The main purpose of whiteboard is to decrease the liquidity of job search for engineers, thus depressing wages. After a few years of doing design docs and copying protobuf fields, the median engineer at a top company would need a month of prep to be able to pass whiteboard interviews again. Much more effective than secret no-poaching agreements.
Re: Hiring without whiteboards
#295The main purpose of whiteboard is to decrease the liquidity of job search for engineers, thus depressing wages. After a few years of doing design docs and copying protobuf fields, the median engineer at a top company would need a month of prep to be able to pass whiteboard interviews again. Much more effective than secret no-poaching agreements.
Interesting! This comment gives even more reasons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13785405
Re: Hiring without whiteboards
#296Am I the only one who thinks the pressure a whiteboard adds is actually something valuable? In my last job there were a lot of situations where you had to solve a real problem under extreme pressure. People who couldn't handle it simply weren't cut for the job. I don't think all interviews should use it but for us it was good for filtering out candidates who would not perform in those situations.
In my experience, if you're regularly coding under extreme pressure, something is wrong. Whiteboard coding is also a different kind of pressure. I can't imagine a situation where someone who already knows the answer is watching over your shoulder critiquing you while you work on a problem.
> In my experience, if you're regularly coding under extreme pressure, something is wrong.
right? unless you are in downtime mode, there's really something wrong with your schedule/deliverables/tasks.
writing code is not a race, it's more of a marathon where you have to be at a healthy pace to get to the end, otherwise you will not be able to finish.
Re: Hiring without whiteboards
#297Earlier 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.
This is why I like the question. As an interviewer, I will leave that matter open and see if the candidate asks for clarification. If so, bonus! But I will tell them to just
solve for ASCII.
The worst-case scenario is a "self-hazing" where someone sees the encoding difficulties and freezes up instead of asking for clarification. I've never seen that happen though, in my experience though, everyone -- even the good ones -- just assume ASCII.
And I am happy enough if they do it correctly.
Re: Hiring without whiteboards
#298Imagine 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…
Whiteboard interviews should be re-framed. Instead of "what is the best method to sort through a list?", set a situation where two co-workers are having a casual chat. "I'm having this problem, I can't sort through this list, any ideas what I should do?"
That kind of discussion between co-workers happens all the time. You suggest ideas. Have you tried this? Yes, but it has that problem. Oh, so what about that other approach? And so on.
It's a lot less stressful than an interview where you are expected to find the right answer, and it's also much closer to your real job.
Re: Hiring without whiteboards
#299Imagine 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…
As someone of East-Asian decent, I totally get this. But I also can understand the counter-point: if you are joining a company of predominantly "anglo-saxon" peoples, does that company not have a valid concern that the people they are hiring are conducive with their current work process (i.e. communication, collaboration, etc.).
I understand your comment isn't advocating for what I am insinuating, but in general, I think the sentiment that companies need to adjust their culture for their candidates is problematic.
Re: Hiring without whiteboards
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 absolutel…
> They don't necessarily care about syntax errors or spelling errors, but they absolutely want working code.
I'm not sure how code with "syntax or spelling errors" qualifies as "working code." The fact that they don't care about those things is pretty much the exact thing I was trying to communicate.
Other things they probably don't care about: unimplemented placeholder functions (they might ask you to go back and fill those in if they thing it would be informative and there's time), or misremembered function/method names (though it's important to communicate that you know you don't remember).
I mean, obviously they do want code that demonstrates a well thought out solution to the problem. But no one expects that you could just copy it into a text file compile it, and have it run - that's what I meant when I said no one cares if you're writing working code.