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Hiring Without Whiteboards

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Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#91

Post by pb7 »

nsainsbury wrote: post #78
marcinzm wrote: post #46

The advantage of leetcode is that you study once and then it applies for every job you interview for. Like democracy it's a horrible system except for all the others. Take home project? There goes 4-12 hours per company that gives you one and sometimes more. Companies have no incentive to cut it down or not give it to even marginal candidates so you'll get a lot more of them than full in-person interviews. Pair progr…

I would argue the problem is it's not a one-time cost. You pay the cost almost every time you want to change jobs, because leetcode/algorithmic interview questions are so fundamentally different to what we actually do day-to-day as developers. It is very easy to completely forget all about graph algorithms in, say, 3 - 5 years during which time you've been a productive, valuable member of a software development team…

Small price to pay to get more and more absurdly high paying jobs every 3-5 years.

Being a productive, valuable member of a software development team is teaching you things that will set you up for success in higher level roles. You won’t be taken for those roles on Leetcode interview performance alone.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#92

Post by throwawaywrench »

chrisseaton wrote: post #14
pklausler wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ask them some questions about it over lunch? What’s your threat model here? People making up elaborate lies about code they’ve written?

I have heard of someone trying and pass off repos forked into their github account as their own work. A quick google or even just looking at the commit history in their fork made it obvious it wasnt true.

Manipulating one or more git repos to claim it as yours then ensuring your lie is not uncovered by googling would be technically challenging enough that those who could do probably don't need to.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#93

Post by pb7 »

yelloweyes wrote: post #76
crsv wrote: post #38

Here we go again perpetuating the stereotype of the whiney privileged engineer put in a position of mild discomfort by the villainous abusive white board interview boogeyman. I don’t mind whiteboard interview exercises. They’re not great, but they often give a very good and reasonable signal that often has a high corollary to work performance. I think there’s bigger fish to fry in refining fair and objective intervie…

Are you an engineer? If you are, then do you realize how dumb you are by not sticking up for your own profession? Do you think FAANG pays engineers 200k because they're oh so nice companies? Or is it because talented people are hard to find?

What if I like the current interview format?

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#94

Post by mars4rp »

yelloweyes wrote: post #76
crsv wrote: post #38

Here we go again perpetuating the stereotype of the whiney privileged engineer put in a position of mild discomfort by the villainous abusive white board interview boogeyman. I don’t mind whiteboard interview exercises. They’re not great, but they often give a very good and reasonable signal that often has a high corollary to work performance. I think there’s bigger fish to fry in refining fair and objective intervie…

Are you an engineer? If you are, then do you realize how dumb you are by not sticking up for your own profession? Do you think FAANG pays engineers 200k because they're oh so nice companies? Or is it because talented people are hard to find?

Yeah if a poor nerd makes some decent money, they need to abuse him with stupid whiteboard questions. But no one is questioning the money CEO, executives,managers, lawyers, etc are getting.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#95

Post by choppaface »

bit_logic wrote: post #81

Another tech interview thread. For the side that supports these types of interviews, I've never gotten a good answer to a simple question: in the year 2020, why are we expecting people to write compilable code on a whiteboard? It's just stupid at this point. Even a laptop that boots into some micro linux distro and has nothing but nano open would be better. Or just a fresh install windows laptop with nothing but note…

As somebody who has sadly had to make hundreds of candidates write on a whiteboard, here are problems I’ve run into getting the candidate a laptop:

* IT just fails: they’re unwilling to supply it, there aren’t enough, the current laptops on hand are junk, or the default password is wrong. These all happen with HR buy-in and funding.

* Recruiting just fails: they “have to move the candidate fast because of a competing offer,” they tried to work with IT but IT blocked them, they got laptops themself using their own budget but then ran out.

* I failed: I didn’t make time to prepare a non-whiteboard question, I didn’t tell my manager in each and every 1:1 that candidate experience sucks, I had three laptops and I forgot to bring my personal spare to the interview.

In general the core problem is there is zero incentive for hiring managers to do anything but shotgun candidate pools like they do today. There’s also no feedback loop to evaluators to help them improve. False negatives are completely tolerated despite there being a huge gap between CS jobs demand and CS graduate supply.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#96

Post by dudul »

mbil wrote: post #45

This is a great list. Thanks for sharing it. I actually had the pleasure of interviewing at one of these companies before. They had a take-home project, which was to choose and implement and couple enhancements to a toy app. In the subsequent conversations, we discussed how I approached the problem, details of my design, technical tradeoffs, etc -- all the sorts of things you would expect a professional sw engineer t…

> A major issue is that they require candidates to have free time outside of work to complete them.

Just like onsite interviews. Any interview process will require candidates to spend time outside of work. The only way to fix that would be a true, universally recognized certification/diploma that would prove that you can write software, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#97

Post by enjeyw »

0xFFC wrote: post #17
enjeyw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feedback is well intentioned, so please don't take it as an attack. As much as we'd rather it not be the case, even for programmers writing skills are incredibly important. This comment is contains a few grammatical errors and is quite hard to read - I checked your comment history and many others suffer from the same problem. As some who hires, if I read a job application with this quality of writing, I'd probab…

I really apricate your feedback. Just one thing you should take into consideration, that is, as ESL I am not going to put that much effort on writing comments on HN to check for every grammatical error. I simply don't have that much time and energy. I do understand what you say. But that is not the case sadly.

>Just one thing you should take into consideration, that is, as ESL I am not going to put that much effort on writing comments on HN to check for every grammatical error. I simply don't have that much time and energy.

Yeah, I had a hunch that might have been the case, but didn't want to make too many assumptions. I can't string a single sentence together in another language, so I can only guess at what a pain it must be to deal with on a day-to-day basis!

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#98

Post by kanobo »

pandaman wrote: post #89
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.

This proposal comes up in every interviewing discussion on HN. Apart from the usual rebuttals (you are generally hiring only from unemployed people pool this way), here is a fresh one - this opens your company's codebase for reading and writing (even supervised but, still) to anyone. If you already open-source your code it's not a problem but otherwise you don't want random people looking into your code due to: paten…

All large companies already have large contractor workforces that work on the non-critical products, I don't really see how that's different from employing highly qualified candidates with probably better resumes and referrals than those who are employed at 3rd party contractor companies.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#99

Post by 8organicbits »

shiftF5 wrote: post #32

This seems to promote Google Docs > whiteboard, what? At least you can brainstorm or draw diagrams on a whiteboard. IMHO the worst of these options is coderpad/hackerrank/etc. - it's robotic, discourages pseudocode, and perpetuates the idea that rote memorization is required to pass an interview.

Brainstorming with a candidate is great, when you can get them to let you in to their thought process. It easily can turn a technically incorrect answer into a strong answer.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#100

Post by dudul »

madamelic wrote: post #56
NikolaNovak wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure - That would neatly eliminate majority of qualified candidates :-) Very few people who are successfully employed would take a risk / have a luxury to forsake their certain employment for an extremely short term contract (with all the registration, taxation, regulation etc headache this implies!) and extremely limited chance of gainful employment. (it's perspectives like these that make me realize how much of a g…

>with all the registration, taxation, regulation etc headache this implies! It's not if you are in the US. You will get a 1099 from where you worked, you write it on your 1040 and include the 1099 with your taxes if I recall from when I was an independent contractor for a while. It takes maybe like 10 minutes extra and 1099-ing is incredibly common nowadays (unfortunately) so not a super weird case. And it's not regu…

A lot of employees in the US sign IP documents that prevent them from working on anything, or everything they code is owned by their employer, etc.
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