31–40 of 372 posts
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?
Now, if a company insists on an adversarial process, there are better ways to do it. The nature of the problem is given in advance. Both the subject and the evaluator go in blind, and they both do it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably a lot fewer people send in completed coding projects, so you are competing against fewer other candidates. If you are good at selling yourself, whiteboard interviews are awesome. If you are nervous in interview situations, starting with a project could be an advantage. Edited to add: coming in for a whiteboard interview will also take few hours of your time (or longer if you need to travel). A sample proje…
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.
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 stick around. It's too time consuming for the hiring managers.
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?
1. You get to introspect the environment. I've had lots of candidates forget whether certain objects support simple methods (map, sort, join etc). CoderPad lets you perform quick tests to make sure.
2. You get to debug how you would normally debug. Whiteboard interviews basically rely on the interviewer saying something "Are you suuuuure there's no bugs on, say, lines 10 through 12?". I find this incredibly stressful as both the interviewer and candidate. CoderPad lets you run the damn thing yourself and see if it says what you want it to say.
3. Compared to probably the next most relevant comparison, graded homework assignments, I think CoderPad's free-form format is much more forgiving. As a candidate, I've definitely wasted hours trying to get some hidden automated test suite to pass with no feedback as to what sort of failure was encountered. CoderPad blends code evaluation with live feedback from the interviewer.
Yes, social pressure can be daunting for many candidates. I don't think this is something you can avoid in a live interview in general. I think you can get pretty good signal from project submission from candidates, but at the cost of greatly increased time spent by both candidates and interviewers. For many people this may be a worthwhile trade and I think additional options are good, too.
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…
When I've been job hunting in the past I've also found that these have been the best situations for me. I find coding questions beyond fizbuzz totally silly and when something more is requested of me my attitude shows this.
The reality of programming is, these days everyone Google's their problems. Sometimes you end up at StackOverflow or sometimes you find yourself on a random blog or official documentation. Occasionally you ask a coworker for help, but the ego a lot of developers have to be smart means most feel intimidated to do so. And sometimes you just bang your head against your desk until things start working.
Whiteboard and highly technical interviews that expect you to know high-level computer science concepts are tilted in the favour of graduates who are freshly minted from whatever respective educational institution they graduated from.
There's nothing wrong with white-boards, it's how they are used that matters.
A skilled interviewer can come up with a good algorithmic interview, when he/she is genuinely looking for how people deal with hard problems and not knowing the algorithms themselves is fine. A less skilled interviewer will just get some question from the internet and accept only one answer as a correct one, and so on.
But at the same time, some people have a prima donna-like attitude towards interviewing, and it is often counter-productive.
Hiring people is hard. Spending time in poor interviews sucks. But let's not make a circle-jerk out of interviewing :)
The problem with whiteboards, is they're not reflective of real life. When was the last time you can honestly say you used a whiteboard to solve a programming problem instead of Googling and ending at a StackOverflow question with a great answer? I've never used a whiteboard for programming. I've used plenty of whiteboards for things one level back; planning, prioritising and visualising task related things. The real…
Yesterday. Although, usually I pull out a notebook instead, and work things out with colleagues (or on my own) on paper at my desk. That happens several times a day.
The problem with whiteboards, is they're not reflective of real life. When was the last time you can honestly say you used a whiteboard to solve a programming problem instead of Googling and ending at a StackOverflow question with a great answer? I've never used a whiteboard for programming. I've used plenty of whiteboards for things one level back; planning, prioritising and visualising task related things. The real…