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Hiring without whiteboards

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Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#321

Post by crasco »

jonahx wrote: post #301
wollstonecraft wrote: post #294

The 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.

While it may have the effect of decreasing job liquidity, I don't see how that effect could be the main purpose unless you believe companies are mass colluding. Because the company running the interview is highly motivated to find a good candidate quickly and reliably. A less intriguing but probably more accurate reason is that finding good people is hard, nobody really knows how to do it, whiteboard interviews provi…

You mean collusion like this?

http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-job...

It was happening, only more blatantly than is suggested here. Of course they are all motivated to find good candidates, but they are also motivated to keep their existing folks. Decreasing liquidity and mobility serves the latter purpose at the expense of the former.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#322

Post by a3n »

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…

> 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.

I interviewed once with a couple of owners in a restaurant. They asked me something relevant, and I all but froze. I knew the subject, but it just would not reveal itself to me.

I candidly admitted "brainlock." They were very gracious about it, I soon got through that subject and we moved on. I was eventually hired.

The lesson being, for myself at least, not being able to produce "on the fly" is sometimes compounded by being afraid to show or admit a problem. Good people, however, will be forgiving and encouraging. They've been there themselves, we all have.

There have been a number of times, over the decades, that I have basically admitted ignorance or temporary brainlock, and it has always gone well, whether I was hired or not. I think, if nothing else, that it's refreshing and novel for the interviewer.

It really reduces stress if you allow yourself to be human. In turn, that's much easier if you don't put yourself in a position that "I must have this job."

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#323

Post by a3n »

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…

> I completely froze on a phone interview once.

Ah, the memories come rushing back. I once froze in an interview, and force myself to blather something inane so that the phone wouldn't be silent. It went horribly.

I called back later that day or the next (it's been a long time), and basically said "that's not me. I know what I'm doing!" We had a conversation about the subject that I botched. It went well in part because I had already accepted that I'd lost that job; I just didn't want to leave an impression anywhere that I was a loon.

I got that job.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#324

Post by user5994461 »

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…

> 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.

Please replace these guys with HackerRank. It so much better than this.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#325

Post by wilkystyle »

ryandrake wrote: post #234
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…

All your points are good--and they are part of the overall problem with whiteboard coding: A whiteboard is not even close to a realistic modern development environment. How many times, for your job, have you had to code up a solution to a problem, even a trivial one: 1. Just given to you 5 seconds ago 2. With no access to documentation (paper, textbooks, offline or online resources) 3. With no access to mentors or co…

This, to me, is the most important point. We make such a big deal about making sure our tests actually test the thing we care about; why aren't we doing the same thing with our interviewing processes?

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#326

Post by pimlottc »

alexeiz wrote: post #275
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…

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 think this is generally good advice but it's possible to overdo it. I noticed on my last round of interviews that I was vocalizing my internal thoughts so much that it was hard to concentrate and think deeply. I'm still working on finding a good middle ground.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#327

Post by NTDF9 »

george_ciobanu wrote: post #278
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…

Disclaimer: I work at Google but in no way do I represent my employer's views. These are all my personal opinions. I interned successfully at FB, Microsoft and Google as a SWE in 2008-2010 and interviewed with a lot of other tech companies (not always but often successfully). Like you, I tend to freeze up in a whiteboard situation, and have most of my life, going back to college and prior (I studied in Romania where…

>> Am I missing any other ways to assess candidates?

Yes. You are completely glossing over the fact that the candidate might be bringing something special to the table.

You have literally not left any room for the candidate to showcase what they've learned (again, not minutia of algorithms but something completely different..like the candidate could be a specialist in how compilers do register allocation)

How about the interviewer improving their interviewing skills to be able to identify strengths rather than being a pseudo automata that docks points?

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#328

Post by grecy »

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 find people are quite reasonable in real life. Unlike the internet, they're not going to bite your head off.

Next time it happens, tell the truth.

"Oh, hey guys, I get really, really nervous about whiteboard coding. It's really scary for me and right now I feel like my brain has stopped and I'm going to fail miserably. Would it be OK if we do this another way? - maybe on a computer, or maybe I can just talk about it?"

If you need it, you can also say "Can I please have a 5 minute break to get my head straight? Maybe a quick walk to the bathroom and a glass of water?"

I would be utterly and completely shocked if a rational, intelligent human being denied you that. And if they did, would you want to be working for/with them anyway?

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#329

Post by muninn_ »

grecy wrote: post #328
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 find people are quite reasonable in real life. Unlike the internet, they're not going to bite your head off. Next time it happens, tell the truth. "Oh, hey guys, I get really, really nervous about whiteboard coding. It's really scary for me and right now I feel like my brain has stopped and I'm going to fail miserably. Would it be OK if we do this another way? - maybe on a computer, or maybe I can just talk about i…

Only issue with this is that those interviewing you might not be who are hiring you or you would be working for. So maybe their lame, but your actual day to day or your actual boss are awesome. Though it's on the company for not providing a good interview experience.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#330

Post by y2kenny »

alexeiz wrote: post #275
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…

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…

In my experience, as an introvert and an ESL (even after living in North America for 20+ year and been educated here from high school onward), the need to verbalize thoughts actually compound on the stress more. I understand why I should be talking (I am sure all your points are valid) but I just can't help it. I'd say the only comparable level of stress and anxiety is dating.
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