More whiteboard coding won’t build you a better team • Hacker News Board

Re: More whiteboard coding won’t build you a better team

#41

Post by untog » Tue, Oct 02, 2012, 9:21 PM UTC

loeschg wrote: post #36

ianstallings wrote: post #12

I don't care about these tests. I have a very simple interview process - I ask you what you've done and we talk through it. I may even ask you about how you've solved some problems involved with whatever you were working on. I then jokingly ask you about an inner join or a fib sequence and laugh after a few seconds. Maybe it's because my I come from the family business of construction years ago, but I believe that it…

Man... I don't know what I'd do if an interviewer presented that situation up front and very directly. "We'll hire you fast, but we won't hesitate to let you go." I wouldn't be able to stop thinking of the bad news bears scenario where I quit my job, get hired, and fired at the new one within a couple months. I guess it depends how awesome the job is that I'm applying for and how (not) awesome the job is that I'm lea…

Try being on the country on a work visa. Makes that situation 100x more terrifying.

Re: More whiteboard coding won’t build you a better team

#42

Post by chris_mahan » Tue, Oct 02, 2012, 9:30 PM UTC

wtetzner wrote: post #20

gordonguthrie wrote: post #6

The key thing is that 'you don't want to hire people to write code'. Code is inventory, code has a cost, code-not-written is what you want (as much as possible). So you need to hire a developer who knows 'how not to code', 'when not to code', how to write as little code as possible (libraries, reuse and designing things that don't take much code, clean, concise, elegant, and well-structured). These sort of developers…

Even better, a developer that can take an existing code base and shrink it.

you mean get rid of it. Or, failing that, replace it with 30 lines of python.

Re: More whiteboard coding won’t build you a better team

#43

Post by groby_b » Tue, Oct 02, 2012, 9:57 PM UTC

bduerst wrote: post #27

groby_b wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is adversarial, because it's a gating mechanism. Sure, I'll be happy to discuss deep issues with you - after you've shown me that you're proficient in basic CS. It used to be that you could screen that over the phone, but now that you can look up the answers on your phone, that's kind of hard :)

But the question he is raising with the false positives is that it is a gating mechanism for what ? The ability to talk shop on a white board?

I'm assuming in my answer that the interview happens at a shop that cares about CS proficiency. (Mine certainly does ;)

If I have a false positive (i.e. you seem to understand CS but don't fit the company), it's not like the CS question is all that's asked. It's the launch point for a deeper discussion. That means a false positive hopefully gets caught in that later stage, but deep CS knowledge is sine qua non.

If that skill (knowledge of CS) doesn't matter to your shop, then yes, you shouldn't use it for gating.

Re: More whiteboard coding won’t build you a better team

#44

Post by j_baker » Tue, Oct 02, 2012, 9:57 PM UTC

munin wrote: post #10

semi-serious devils advocacy. I don't know if the below is an argument that is correct but I hope for it to be proven wrong. I am pretty sure that accurately assessing individual capacity/potential is really, really, really hard. "Google is a very successful technology company. While some of the problems they solve are very challenging and require innovative thinking and research, they have employees with decades of…

I think this argument is simple, beautiful, and wrong. The assumption this seems to be built upon is that Google has developed a great hiring system that is doing well for us. I think that's a bit simplistic.

The reality is that (like everything at Google), the hiring process is constantly evolving and changing. Google puts considerable effort into improving its hiring process.

So, my counterargument is this: If Google is tweaking its hiring process and trying to make it better, why shouldn't you? Don't think of it as relaxing your standards, because it isn't. Think of it as changing your standards to better suit the kind of people you want to hire.

Re: More whiteboard coding won’t build you a better team

#45

Post by groby_b » Tue, Oct 02, 2012, 10:03 PM UTC

dorkrawk wrote: post #30

I've always thought that a good programmer job interview challenge would be to hand the candidate a laptop (preferably with their OS of choice) and have them build something simple but new. For example: "Have you ever built a web scraper in Ruby? No? Ok, Ruby's installed on this computer. Here's a CLI, a text editor, and a browser with Google open, feel free to make use of existing language resources, build me someth…

We used to do that at my previous company. We'd actually have several candidates come in together, have them form an ad-hoc team, and spend 6 hours on solving a real-world (toy) problem. With one existing team member on that test team, and a rotating team of observers.

It's a great method to hire, but it's expensive - you better make sure that the people you invite in are pre-checked quite well.

It definitely was the most fun I ever had interviewing.

Re: More whiteboard coding won’t build you a better team

#46

Post by captaintacos » Wed, Oct 03, 2012, 5:56 AM UTC

skyebook wrote: post #32

Asking how someone would go about solving a problem is a good question to ask but simply can't replace making sure the candidate can write code. Imagine hiring script-kiddies instead of actual hackers. As an aside, did anyone else see the irony in the word "competent" being misspelled?

Yep. We all did. Hence the "[sic]" used by some commenters in here when quoting the author -> "Competant [sic] developers, even those..."

On the other hand. What would be the difference between a script-kiddie and an "actual hacker"? The years of experience? Or the purpose for what the code will be used for?