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Hiring Without Whiteboards

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Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#61

Post by mxcrossb »

mjrbrennan wrote: post #51
wendyshu wrote: post #5

No one enjoys whiteboard interviews but it's not clear that these companies have better alternatives. Many of them do take home projects which are time consuming. I'd prefer the employer look at my GitHub profile as there's plenty of code there already. Furthermore, I'm not a fan of "interviews" in general, I find that more information is transmitted by eating lunch with the team and talking like normal people.

I'd much rather do a take-home project at my own pace funded by the company, seeing as how my personal GitHub is a barren wasteland (well...it was before I started working for an OSS company).

In the future, when looking at github becomes a standard hiring practice, companies will start going full closed source so that their talent can’t jump ship.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#62

Post by paranoidrobot »

grogenaut wrote: post #41
paranoidrobot wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code often doesn't stand alone, there's going to be a commit history, there's often going to be comments and issues on other projects. Ask questions about the code: - why did you write this in this way - explain how this works - if you needed to add X into this, how would you do it - are there other ways to achieve what you did here, what are the pros/cons of this? - what would you do differently if you were to re-wr…

I had a former coworker re-write a library we had open sourced as their own. They had used the original version at work so knew it well, knew the internals by asking lots of questions while working for performance reasons. They renamed things and changed pointers around to their preference. They did this right before they left and had it on github as their work. They could meet all of your questions. They didn't real…

I don't see a solution for this. What you're describing is someone who's clearly good enough to take a project and rewrite it, and still be able to talk in detail about the code.

I'd bet they could also pass a whiteboard, pair-programming or take-home test too.

That they are willing to lie about it and pass off other's work as their own isn't something that you're going to identify in your typical code interview. Using interrogation tactics to try and weed out the frauds is going to be counter-productive, by driving off all the good candidates.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#63

Post by keanebean86 »

amiantos wrote: post #15
pklausler wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an interviewer, how do I know that you wrote that code in your GitHub profile?

Have the interviewee submit repos in which they're the only contributor? But, uh, with a take home project, you _really_ don't know that they wrote the code, either...

Do a take-home project but don't make them write from scratch. Give them a mostly working starter application.

Sprinkle in some bugs. Start with easy spelling errors and go all the way to concurrency problems.

Ask them to add a few simple features and fix any bugs they find. Bonus points if they find bugs you didn't add intentionally. Good unit tests are also a bonus.

Give them a couple days or something. Don't count off if they don't get everything done. It's better to do a few things correctly that fix everything with hacks.

Invite them to email questions/suggestions to the hiring team. This person might be on your team so it's nice to find out early if they have good ideas or they hound you with stack overflow questions all day.

I've never had this kind of interview but it sounds nice to me. It's more realistic to real daily work. You can cheat by having someone else do the work but that's always a possibility.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#64

Post by Impossible »

grogenaut wrote: post #41
paranoidrobot wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code often doesn't stand alone, there's going to be a commit history, there's often going to be comments and issues on other projects. Ask questions about the code: - why did you write this in this way - explain how this works - if you needed to add X into this, how would you do it - are there other ways to achieve what you did here, what are the pros/cons of this? - what would you do differently if you were to re-wr…

I had a former coworker re-write a library we had open sourced as their own. They had used the original version at work so knew it well, knew the internals by asking lots of questions while working for performance reasons. They renamed things and changed pointers around to their preference. They did this right before they left and had it on github as their work. They could meet all of your questions. They didn't real…

One question is, if someone is doing elaborate deceptive work like this, gets hired and has no problems performing the job, does it actually matter? Some people mostly or entirely code at work, so this looks like a legitimate way to get a "good" project in GitHub that he knew well. It sucks that it's deceptive (which could be a major red flag), but it's also clear enough that he understood a large codebase well enough to explain it and modify and/or refactor it, which is honestly the majority of a SWE job. A lot of people are concerned about the "purity" of how someone solves an interview challenge, and outside of potential ethical red flags, people that "cheat" the system are often putting in a lot of work, and are as likely as anyone else to be capable of doing the work.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#65

Post by sangli »

new_realist wrote: post #3

To a large degree, these look like no-name companies who probably have to resort to this kind of thing to make up for worse pay and benefits as compared to FAANG.

Anyone else sick and tired of FAANG worship? Lot of groundbreaking stuff came from smaller companies and startups.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#66

Post by sli »

wendyshu wrote: post #5

No one enjoys whiteboard interviews but it's not clear that these companies have better alternatives. Many of them do take home projects which are time consuming. I'd prefer the employer look at my GitHub profile as there's plenty of code there already. Furthermore, I'm not a fan of "interviews" in general, I find that more information is transmitted by eating lunch with the team and talking like normal people.

> I find that more information is transmitted by eating lunch with the team and talking like normal people.

As an introverted and generally very socially anxious developer, this sounds like a dream compared to a standard interview, which has always felt to me more like an interrogation and generally very aggressive and hostile. I'm confident in my skills and I can communicate well in other situations, but the typical interview environment is cripplingly stressful to me. I would love to just get through a talkative lunch instead.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#68

Post by cletus »

Oh God, here we go again.

Coding on a whiteboard in an interview is not "broken". What is "broken" however is making the problem the candidate needs to solve "hard". I can't stress this enough: a whiteboard coding test is nothing more than a negative filter. It's to filter out people who can't turn a simple idea into code as these people exist.

This is why FizzBuzz was such a simple problem.

But interviewers fall into the trap of thinking "this problem is too easy" and make it hard (eg figuring out a problem is g union-find on the spot and then implementing it) or, worse, they make it a crap shoot of whether you know the "trick" or not (eg reversing bits in O(log n) or the tortoise and the hare). This actually makes the test completely useless.

A negative filter is simply a filter whereby if you fail it, you almost certainly aren't a great hire but the reverse doesn't apply: there should be no A+ on a whiteboard coding test. It's straight pass/fail and an easy pass at that.

I realize some people have anxiety about doing this. Having helped or coached a bunch of people in the past about this, I can say that mock interviews and practice help the vast majority of these people. Some may be helped by doing this on a laptop in a shared doc instead, which is fine.

A few will struggle with the anxiety of that, even with coaching and practice. While I feel bad for those people, I do wonder if a reasonable-sized organization, which will generally require a certain level of communication skills and presentation ability, is the right place for you.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#69

Post by htrp »

kanobo wrote: post #4

If I were a large company with money I would simply ask all qualified applicants if they would be willing to work on a small part of a real project as a contractor with the possibility of getting hired. Applicants get paid for their time, productivity is achieved, jobs might be offered, everybody is happy.

best you'll get is 2 hours for a takehome...

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#70

Post by rockinghigh »

kanobo wrote: post #4

If I were a large company with money I would simply ask all qualified applicants if they would be willing to work on a small part of a real project as a contractor with the possibility of getting hired. Applicants get paid for their time, productivity is achieved, jobs might be offered, everybody is happy.

It would increase the barrier to entry, reduce the pool of potential candidates, and increase the load on HR and hiring managers. Most candidates already have a job and may not want to start contracting for multiple companies in addition to their current job. This would also exclude candidates on a work visa like H1-B.
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