311–320 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?
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…
Devil's advocate: How else will you prove that YOU shipped those things over that period? * Github account? Ha, my code is on github in many places, mostly without attribution, none of them uploaded by me. * Recommendations? Ha. Unless the person recommending you already works at the company, their trustworthiness is zero - they could be a paid accomplice. * Resume? Unless you were the sole employee, there is no way…
I don't write code on whiteboards for a living, nor am I applying for a job that will have me coding on whiteboards, so watching me do that will tell you almost nothing about the job you're actually hiring me for.
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What does that have to do with solving problems? If you can't do it off the top of your head, a quick search will give you the formula and then you plug it in. Questions like this make me not accept a job offer for a place.
In general I don't like questions like this either, but this particular one seems designed to test your wits if not your memory: if you don't happen to remember the formula, you can quickly derive it. I bet if you said out loud "It's the area of the end circle times the height of the cylinder", you wouldn't have to go any farther.
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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?
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It's obvious that they're not going to use the code you wrote at an interview in production. So "just use a library" is not a relevant answer. The question was probably posed to give you an interesting engineering challenge to work through with the interviewer so that they could see your problem solving process. Instead you just argued with the interviewer.
The GP's point (which I supported) is that it's a waste of time to take a candidate through scenarios that are not at least similar to what they'd actually encounter doing the actual job.
Similarly, I've never had to implement fizz buzz for real, actual, work. But I wouldn't trust a programmer who was incapable of doing fizz buzz without importing a fizz buzz library.
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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…
What is the field you hire coders for? Because for the mine (iOS) your ability to code fizzbuzz have little relevance. The knowledge of APIs, common patterns, ObjC vs. Swift, common means to handle dependencies, etc. etc. is impossible(?) to fake if you do not have relevant experience you claim you do.
Fizz buzz tests for "does this person know what a function is, what an if statement is, and the modulo operator". And frankly, I'd give the modulo answer away for free if the candidate asked.
All programmers should know what a function and an if statement is.
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…
Devil's advocate: How else will you prove that YOU shipped those things over that period? * Github account? Ha, my code is on github in many places, mostly without attribution, none of them uploaded by me. * Recommendations? Ha. Unless the person recommending you already works at the company, their trustworthiness is zero - they could be a paid accomplice. * Resume? Unless you were the sole employee, there is no way…
I agree if that was the only thing you asked, you wouldn't get a good answer. However, if you then dug into their answer you can probably tell if it is BS or not.
I remember having this exact experience with a junior dev who claimed to worked on some interesting projects at Uni, but when you dug deeper, you realised he knew very little about the technology he supposedly used.
That said, my company isn't really interested in hiring people who can code an algorithm to balance b-trees. My company just need people who know how to ask questions, write maintainable code, and use a profiler.
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…
Devil's advocate: How else will you prove that YOU shipped those things over that period? * Github account? Ha, my code is on github in many places, mostly without attribution, none of them uploaded by me. * Recommendations? Ha. Unless the person recommending you already works at the company, their trustworthiness is zero - they could be a paid accomplice. * Resume? Unless you were the sole employee, there is no way…
I told the candidates that they did not necessarily needed to show me a working application (although that would have been great!), but simply to document what architecture, language and approaches they would use to implement the task.
Also the task could be documented in a few hours, and those that got close to coding a few classes might have spent a day at it. Now the argument could be made that I did not remunerate this people, but keep in mind the work they did was not expected to be more than a few hours.
For me, this is an ideal technical interview. Also, I ended hiring a candidate though this method, and he is by far the most productive and creative force in our team.
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.
But if you are in python, and given a string object, and told to reverse it without using the reverse method.... Yeah, that's easy. You should be able to do that.
People are usually expecting the latter.
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My office is a satellite of a larger one in Austin; we provide laptops for candidates to use for the "remote" part of the interview, when they interview with someone in Austin. But in general, I think the idea of the whiteboard interview is a chance to see someone "think out loud", to see them reason through a problem. Getting a chunk of source code in an email isn't representative of that. (At worst, they paid someo…
> At worst, they paid someone to do it for them Which would easily come out at the interview when they fail to answer basic questions about their code. > at best, you have no idea what their approach was So? Did you get code that would pass a code review? Did you get code with good commits/history?
It is much easier to talk about a solution, when the solution is right there in front of you, and you read an explanation of the solution online.
Regurgitating someone else's solution is fairly easy.