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Hiring Without Whiteboards

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Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#371

Post by joaomagalhaes »

non-entity wrote: post #298
joaomagalhaes wrote: post #282

We use a simple 2 step process that allows both the company and the candidate to have more certainty about the opportunity. This only applies to technical jobs. 1 - First interview. Does the candidate know about the company? Does he know anything about the business domain? Conversation about problems he has encountered in his past experiences. it works like a knowledge sharing conversation, you really get to know how…

Are all your candidates students or unemployed at the time of interviewing? How do people find that 20h/week?

the average is 15h-20h per week. Imagine 2h each work day + weekends. We don't enforce these hours, if they want they can work more or less.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#372

Post by joaomagalhaes »

ffdjjjffjj wrote: post #328
joaomagalhaes wrote: post #282

We use a simple 2 step process that allows both the company and the candidate to have more certainty about the opportunity. This only applies to technical jobs. 1 - First interview. Does the candidate know about the company? Does he know anything about the business domain? Conversation about problems he has encountered in his past experiences. it works like a knowledge sharing conversation, you really get to know how…

Wouldn’t this exclude the strongest candidates who can get other job offers?

No, it gives us the opportunity to show the strongest candidates a better alternative

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#373

Post by 29athrowaway »

When the bar is low and interviews are easy, the bar is not only low for you, but also for your coworkers.

If the interview bar is too low, you will be exchanging hours of frustration by months to years of frustration.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#374

Post by random_coder »

marcinzm wrote: post #349
marta_morena_25 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My worst experience so far were pair-programming interviews. This requires so much training on the interviewee side of things that most companies just completely tank this one. They have some fixed expectations in their head and they have not a single clue how to objectively evaluate candidates.

Yup, leetcode at least is fairly easy to make interviewers competent enough at giving especially if you restrict the problems they can give. Although worst one me and my friends have gotten were system design. Friend got interrupted with questions every 30 seconds, told to just answer them directly and then failed for not elaborating deeply enough on things.

Same exact thing happened to me at Microsoft during the system design interview round. Interviewer wouldn't just let me explain and kept on arguing about a relatively minor issue and wouldn't let me proceed and in the end failed me because I didn't come up with a good design. Really the whole 45 minutes were like him repeatedly stopping me and coming back to that one issue.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#375

Post by sebdufbeau »

ashconnor wrote: post #368
mountainboot wrote: post #335

I interviewed with one of the companies on that list a few years back (noredink). They gave a timed hackerrank style coding question as round one (so I guess technically not a whiteboard). I passed that, then I had an interview with an actual person. He asked me vague question, like what is architecture, I started to reply with what design tradeoffs I made on the app I was working on. He literally laughed at me, and…

Name and shame the company. It's the best way to get them to change their behaviour.

They did name the company (NoRedInk)

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#376

Post by rocqua »

bananaface wrote: post #359
danjac wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take-home tests are fine in isolation, but if every company does that you'd pretty much be spending all your time doing take-home projects and nothing else. Also many companies will insist on a take home project in addition to everything else, including a whiteboard interview. So you can pour time and effort into this project only to be eliminated further down the line (or just ghosted). It's like they assume applica…

Just look at their GitHub and if it looks good, dive in at the interview to make sure they actually wrote the code. Isolated take-home tests seem ridiculous to me if the candidate has public code available. You're filtering out anyone who likes to avoid duplicated effort.

Requiring github as a CV is worse from the POV of not forcing people to spend a lot of time outside work programming.

Not everyone has the inclination or time to code outside of work. Many of these people are still very competent developers.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#377

Post by pandaman »

wildrhythms wrote: post #319
justinlloyd wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This past week one of the companies on "who's hiring" sent me three challenges that "would only take 2 hours" before I ever got to talk to a human being or even got a human being responding with an email. This was a fully automated system apparently. "Take this programming test, we'll let you know if you're good enough to talk with a human." Whilst the challenges were not particularly complex, you also had to ensure…

I turned down an offer from a direct competitor company because they tried to funnel me through an automated programming "test". I told them I have years of experience at their competing company whose hiring bar is notoriously high, and they still demanded I take their weird test. The company was Goldman Sachs. Name and shame.

I had similar experience with Facebook, not directly competing as they are just expanding into my area of expertise, but they had been looking to poach. The recruiter told me that the first step will be a test to determine if I can program so I told them I am not interested without even trying to negotiate out of it.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#378

Post by t_serpico »

BeetleB wrote: post #223
runT1ME wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>because leetcode/algorithmic interview questions are so fundamentally different to what we actually do day-to-day as developers. I mean, maybe hard or esoteric easy questions but I don't think that's true for basic things like 'find the first duplicate' or '-traverse- this graph'. When people rail on whiteboard coding, I think they mean obscure algorithmic questions and not fundamental data structure questions. I do…

I've worked both as an electrical engineer, and as a SW engineer/developer. "Find the first duplicate": In my actual SW roles, this was trivial: Use a hash/map/dictionary/set. However, this isn't a typical Leetcode question - often it will be with additional constraints (cannot use a set, need O(1) space, etc). I don't doubt there are domains where this is important, but I've never had to do this in my professional w…

thats a great analogy

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#379

Post by tchaffee »

wildrhythms wrote: post #314
fiblye wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people in other comments below are criticizing take-home tasks, but honestly, this sounds nice and balanced. I'd much rather have a couple days to think about a problem and a few hours to implement it over having to take time off work, pay to go all the way to your company at a time that works for both of us, and deal with a white board interview. It's a way bigger investment. So long as it's a small, confin…

I oppose take-home tasks as an interviewer. I don't think employees or prospective employees should be taking work home with them, ever. Instead, collaborating on a problem with the interviewee, discussing the problem and potential solutions, observing how the interviewee recognizes when they go off-track, how they respond to hints and suggestions... these are all better signals than the culmination of some homework…

> collaborating on a problem with the interviewee

That's not how developers spend the vast majority of their time. It's a poor signal in my experience. What it selects for is candidates who are immediately comfortable collaborating in real time with someone they have never met. That doesn't mean you aren't getting good candidates. What is means is that I spend far less than you finding good candidates because I also hire people who are great developers and who would fail at your interview.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#380

Post by Trias11 »

non-entity wrote: post #300
malechimp wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There. That's it. All this is a far-from-optimal filter for the total strangers. Get a foot in the door with an established insider and you get right to the last interview(s). No WBs, no take-home projects.

Does this actually work in practice? From my understanding knowing someone might get you past the initial HR / ATS hell to a first round, but you mostly have to follow typical processes after that.

In some cases yes.

In my experience they were even apologetic "sorry, we have to do this, let's get over it".

Once the pull to get you in is in place - it will help to put a checkmark in internal bureaucracy checklist and minimize unrelated interactions.

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