Hiring without whiteboards • Hacker News Board

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#71

Post by _pmf_ » Wed, Mar 15, 2017, 8:59 AM UTC

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?

Programming problems, not so much. Domain problems, almost daily.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#72

Post by baddox » Wed, Mar 15, 2017, 9:00 AM UTC

nallerooth wrote: post #18

As a follow up to the first interview, we give promising candidates a quite simple task to solve at home and then send back via email the next day. This is used both for some basic evaluation of developers skills (whether they actually solved the problem, did they catch the small oddities hidden in the data set, did they document and write tests, etc.) and as something to discuss during the second interview, in which…

You expect people to write documentation and tests for an interview coding challenge? I sure hope you mention that expectation or at least strongly hint that you're looking for a production-ready coding mindset. It would never in a million years occur to me to write documentation or tests for an interview coding challenge.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#73

Post by NTDF9 » Wed, Mar 15, 2017, 9:04 AM UTC

I personally love whiteboards...but only for discussion of ideas. But interviewers seem to use it only to dock points.

"Oh this guy solved the problem on the whiteboard with good syntax but he uses new and delete. Must be a bad programmer."

I think docking points on whiteboarding just reflects how bad interviewers are at judging skills, possibly because they themselves suck at self-awareness and skills beyond their domain.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#74

Post by scarface74 » Wed, Mar 15, 2017, 9:05 AM UTC

I don't see a problem with whiteboard interviews. I've been to a lot of interviews where they will ask me to explain an architecture and I ask them to do they mind if I draw it out while explaining it.

I've spent so much time in my career explaining architecture it's second nature for me to diagram while I'm talking.

During a whiteboard coding session in an interview, I would do some code and some pseudocode.

But at this point in my career if I saw that the interview was focusing more on coding than architecture/development process/automated testing that would be a big red flag.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#75

Post by muse900 » Wed, Mar 15, 2017, 9:08 AM UTC

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…

I believe the hate comes from unprecedented and hard CS questions asked on the whiteboard.

I recently went to an interview that asked me to balance a binary tree on a whiteboard. It can be done, and I can do it. Thing is when you go to interview for that company that has 2 developers(small team, small company) and ask you that kind of question it puts you off thinking that those guys won't be great to work with (arrogance etc comes in mind).

I am fond of simpler questions, like you said fizzbuz etc. Obviously if you are interviewing a guy that has 2+ years of experience, he has to be able to pass the fizzbuzz test. When you are interviewing someone with 5+ years of experience for a higher up position I guess you do have to ask some harder question, but I personally think just speaking to the guy and asking him stuff about his past projects etc will give you a hint on if he has the skills he is talking about or not. Asking him to outline a hard task he took part and how he solved it is an amazing start. As a 5+ years guy personally would rumble about a few things and it would take me days talking about them. (That will give you an understanding if I've worked before or not on the things outlined on my CV).

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#76

Post by sgift » Wed, Mar 15, 2017, 9:10 AM UTC

bbcbasic wrote: post #59

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. I have trouble recalling the details of things I worked on even say a week ago sometimes. I also don't find most of the work I do that interesting as I've been coding along time solving the same kinds of problems. However to play the game i would of course…

> I have trouble recalling the details of things I worked on even say a week ago sometimes.

No problem here, it probably wasn't very exciting but have you never encountered something which stuck in your mind? Or that you could at least recall some part of a project if someone asked "So, you've written here that you've worked on project xy and did this and that, can you tell us a bit more about it"?

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#77

Post by scarface74 » Wed, Mar 15, 2017, 9:12 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #42

It's funny, whiteboard interviews really would be a better discriminator for founders than employees. They test confidence rather than competence (or technically, competence + confidence). The former is incredibly important for founders, but the latter is probably what you care about more for employees. And yet founders almost never do a whiteboard interview, yet it's standard for technical employees...

My view is that you can't have competence at a certain level without confidence - unless you're just an easily outsourced code slinger. I'm often at a whiteboard explaining architecture, ideas, etc. How do you do that without confidence and some semblance of emotional intelligence.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#78

Post by exDM69 » Wed, Mar 15, 2017, 9:12 AM UTC

baddox wrote: post #68

exDM69 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

I completely agree with you. Once you go past the 15 minute mark, the whiteboard is no longer a good way to do programming aptitude testing. It's a good smoke test, but doesn't really work beyond that.

Of the three examples you mention, I think only the phone number alphabetic representation is a reasonable one to do on a whiteboard.

All the 5 to 10 whiteboard interviews I've had over the years have been smoke tests. This is in Europe, and I got the impression from this thread that it's a common smoke test in Europe and Americans tend to have longer whiteboard interviews.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#79

Post by scarface74 » Wed, Mar 15, 2017, 9:18 AM UTC

nallerooth wrote: post #18

As a follow up to the first interview, we give promising candidates a quite simple task to solve at home and then send back via email the next day. This is used both for some basic evaluation of developers skills (whether they actually solved the problem, did they catch the small oddities hidden in the data set, did they document and write tests, etc.) and as something to discuss during the second interview, in which…

So the company gives you a limited amount of time and no access to the internet and expect you not to hack something together?

If I have a problem to solve "under stress", usually it's just a one off to fix something in production until I have time to write it, refactor it, put a unit test around it, and a code review.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#80

Post by scarface74 » Wed, Mar 15, 2017, 9:19 AM UTC

ry_ry wrote: post #28

I'm seriously tempted to make one of our technical interview questions "you're creating a technical test for role XYZ, how would you structure it" and see what the candidates come up with! Would be interesting tbh.

That would be a great question for a tech lead.