The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy • Hacker News Board

Re: The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy

#61

Post by oblio » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 6:19 PM UTC

jfasi wrote: post #60

oblio wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that for almost any companies except for the big 10 or so, that's the correct approach. Especially for enterprise software. And even in those big 10, for projects which are not directly tied to the things they do at scale (I doubt the Hangouts Android client needs to reinvent the wheel...), it's still the right approach. I'm kind of sick and tired of companies writing their own frameworks and languages when…

> I doubt the Hangouts Android client needs to reinvent the wheel... This actually touches on an interesting point. My notorious interview company is Google. I'm not familiar enough with the Hangouts Android client to tell you anything about it, but for the sake of argument let's unrealistically assume it's trivial. Imagine you have an organization where some engineers are good enough to work on the Hangouts Android…

The only way this actually works is because Google is sitting on a pile of cash, in my opinion.

But regarding your problem, you could solve that by having internal interviews.

And I really doubt that for any complex product people switching will only miss a few weeks of productivity.

Re: The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy

#62

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 6:46 PM UTC

noxToken wrote: post #37

thesmallestcat wrote: post #11

This is like saying running for exercise is a waste of time because you could be driving instead. It's not about knowing a particular sort algorithm. It's about the discipline of solving performance problems in the small. Knowing how quicksort works isn't that helpful. Being accustomed to the thought processes that led to the development of quicksort is important in any non-trivial programming activity. I'm not writi…

I took it to mean that most developers in this current market do not need to know implementation perfect algorithms and data structures like RB trees, depth first search, A*, quicksort, etc. Rather your time is better spent on learning the advantages and disadvantages on the structures and algorithms, and you get more benefit from understanding the implementation. For example, merge sort is dividing a list up into su…

[deleted]

Re: The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy

#63

Post by pan69 » Thu, Feb 15, 2018, 8:21 PM UTC

I think that the whole interviewing and whiteboard frustration is because not all software development is equal. I think software development is a spectrum, with (let's say) on the one hand engineering (the academic side) and the other development (let's call it the "craft" side). Most software positions/roles/jobs sit somewhere in the middle or lean to one side or the other.

Some companies are clearly academic, think of the Google's of this world. Other companies are more crafty/creative, think e.g. of typical web-dev shops. Games development is an interesting one.

As software developers we like to stick things in clearly defined boxes and treat software development as one big box. But I think it isn't.

I believe that the frustration most people have with interviewing is that the wrong style of interviewing is applied for a certain role. E.g. a company that is clearly on the crafts/creative side is hiring like they're Google (because they read about how Google does it on the Internet).

My experience is that in most situations whiteboard interviews don't contribute a single thing. A good conversation about making software usually does a lot more. But I guess for inexperienced interviewers, a whiteboard is an easy tool to hide behind.