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Hiring without whiteboards

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Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#61

Post by exDM69 »

DigitalSea wrote: post #36

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…

Tech interviews are not reflective of real life regardless if there's a whiteboard present or not.

Whenever I've had a whiteboard programming interview, it's always been a trivial problem that's a smoke test for "can this candidate actually write code or is their CV faked". I think it took somewhere between 5 to 15 minutes, which I consider to be rather well spent time compared to spending hours or days on a take home project or anything bigger.

The only time I've been given a take-home assignment I refused to do it because I was extremely busy at that time (finals at uni). The employer gave me an offer anyway. Someone else made a better offer, though (based on a whiteboard session).

The whiteboard is not a good way to assess the level of programming skill of an individual. But it's a good binary indicator of whether they possess any coding skills. If the result is yes and their resume is good, experience is relevant and maybe there's some GitHub or other code they can share, that should be enough to consider a person to be an able programmer.

Like any tool, the whiteboard can be misused. The task should be rather trivial and the time should be short. The purpose should be to weed out the people who have faked their resumes or are applying to programming jobs even though their talent is something entirely different.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#62

Post by d--b »

It looks like many companies in this list use the take-home project approach. The take-home project however is not a replacement to the whiteboard session, as they're not meant to screen at the same level. Once you're given a take home project, you're almost in. It happens when the recruiter really likes the person and wants to dig further with a real life scenario to see how that person would perform.

The whiteboard session is a way to spot people who can't code early in the process.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#63

Post by jonasvp »

et-al wrote: post #60
jonasvp wrote: post #25

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…

> That said, I'm always surprised how many candidates cannot even point to one problem they worked on they found interesting or one solution that they're proud of. It could be that this technique favors people good at telling stories. Personally, I'm a horrible storyteller. If you were to ask me what I did over the weekend, I'll offer some facts like "oh, went swimming in a river and Bob lost his hat, but we found it…

Good point. When I notice that people are struggling with finding something, I usually just pick one thing from the resume and try to go more in depth about that.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#64

Post by jonasvp »

nherment wrote: post #54
jonasvp wrote: post #25

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…

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…

Interesting! I actually love using the whiteboard to sketch solutions and architectural decisions. I believe the hate comes from having to code on a whiteboard - which is justified, since no one ever coded on a whiteboard except in an interview.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#65

Post by baddox »

zbobet2012 wrote: post #9
vinhboy wrote: post #2

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?

I think it's worse than a whiteboard. I have seen very few interviews that expected anything other than psuedo code on a whiteboard. With a repl I could easily pin myself on some trivial bug that interviewers would ignore on the whiteboard...

I thought I disliked whiteboard coding, until I recently had an interview on a provided laptop running one of those JavaScript IDEs. It was miserable. Extreme unusable OS X mouse acceleration, an awful keyboard, an unfamiliar hotkey setup in the text editor, and a tiny 11 inch monitor split into 4 sections which means my editor was maybe 10 lines tall. I failed miserably at a relatively short and simple challenge that I am confident I could code on a remotely familiar and sane computer setup. Heck, I would have preferred writing valid JavaScript on a whiteboard. At least I'd be able to see a lot more lines at a time, which it turns out is pretty important for my ability to code.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#66

Post by tragic »

jon-wood wrote: post #53
lj3 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not disrespectful for a company to ask you to write a little code for them. They're just as invested on the time front as you are since they have to read and analyze what you send them. 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…

A little time is fine but last time I was applying for developer jobs almost all of these tasks would take at least an hour to complete, probably more like two or three to do it in a way I'm willing to show to someone screening me on that basis. By requiring these tasks you're implicitly screening not only people who can't code but also people who don't have three hours to spend on applying to your company. If all yo…

But this is an endless cycle. At some point, the company has to apply some test to see if the candidate is appropriate, IE, can code to the required standard. That will require a time investment from the candidate.

You could simply get rid of the take home test; that will shift the burden to the resume and cover letter, to the advantage of humanities graduates like me.

You could mandate a full day on-site, which will bias against people from out of town who want to relocate and people in delicate situations at their current employer.

For the time poor candidate, there is always the whiteboard exercise... Whose biases we are gathered here to moan about in the first place.

I always feel in these threads that people think hiring is 'broken' and it can be 'fixed' with the proper application of 'one weird trick'. But then all the comments actually have contradictory complaints. So obviously it can't.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#67

Post by jon-wood »

tragic wrote: post #66
jon-wood wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A little time is fine but last time I was applying for developer jobs almost all of these tasks would take at least an hour to complete, probably more like two or three to do it in a way I'm willing to show to someone screening me on that basis. By requiring these tasks you're implicitly screening not only people who can't code but also people who don't have three hours to spend on applying to your company. If all yo…

But this is an endless cycle. At some point, the company has to apply some test to see if the candidate is appropriate, IE, can code to the required standard. That will require a time investment from the candidate. You could simply get rid of the take home test; that will shift the burden to the resume and cover letter, to the advantage of humanities graduates like me. You could mandate a full day on-site, which will…

I'm not really advocating for getting rid of take home tests entirely. There's a lot of value in seeing how someone approaches a known problem and being able to compare that to other solutions.

What I am asking is that companies don't ask me to invest hours of time before they decide if they're even interested in talking to me. At the very least I want to have had a phone interview and the chance to assess whether I'm even interested in working for you. That's particularly relevant when looking for remote friendly employers, I've had several calls in recent days from recruiters responding to me saying I'm looking for remote work which I stopped on finding out what they meant was "at least three months fulltime on site, and then maybe we'll talk about some remote work".

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#68

Post by baddox »

exDM69 wrote: post #61
DigitalSea wrote: post #36

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…

Tech interviews are not reflective of real life regardless if there's a whiteboard present or not. Whenever I've had a whiteboard programming interview, it's always been a trivial problem that's a smoke test for "can this candidate actually write code or is their CV faked". I think it took somewhere between 5 to 15 minutes, which I consider to be rather well spent time compared to spending hours or days on a take hom…

> Whenever I've had a whiteboard programming interview, it's always been a trivial problem that's a smoke test for "can this candidate actually write code or is their CV faked". I think it took somewhere between 5 to 15 minutes, which I consider to be rather well spent time compared to spending hours or days on a take home project or anything bigger.

That sounds pretty reasonable, but I don't think it's the norm. I had an interview over two afternoons with 5 or 6 different whiteboard coding challenges, each around half an hour and each much more substantial than a smoke test. They were things like parsing and evaluating a string with a simple arithmetic expression like "2+3*4+5" or taking a phone number and enumerating every possible alphabetic representation (2 is "a" "b" or "c", etc.).

Google has example whiteboard interview questions on YouTube, and one of them was writing a function in C++ that takes an array of integers and a target integer and calculates whether some subset of the array sums to the target integer.

Not the most difficult things ever, but hardly smoke tests, and pretty annoying to whiteboard in my opinion.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#69

Post by lrem »

lj3 wrote: post #33
gedrap wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not disrespectful for a company to ask you to write a little code for them. They're just as invested on the time front as you are since they have to read and analyze what you send them. 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…

If you're hiring backend engineers, code tests can be easily automated away on the correctness and efficiency aspects. Add lint on top and and an engineer eyeballing the style for a few minutes. Voilà, 4 reports per employee hour.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#70

Post by baddox »

ori_b wrote: post #39
DigitalSea wrote: post #36

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…

> 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? 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.

I scribble in notebooks a lot too, but it's very rarely anything resembling pseudocode or any representation of the actual algorithm I'm working on. It's usually just a todo list, with occasional things heavily underlined so I don't forget them. I often do something similar at the end of the day if I need to remind myself where I left off. For me, it's not at all comparable to whiteboard coding.
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