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Lots of companies do that, fwiw...though I agree that many companies may benefit from doing it more instead of blindly following the "big tech" whiteboard style
by rco8786 11y ago
Lots of companies do that, fwiw...though I agree that many companies may benefit from doing it more instead of blindly following the "big tech" whiteboard style.
Here's the thing about the whiteboard coding interviews:
A) There's a huge false negative rate. I.E. a lot of good engineers get turned down because of a bad whiteboard exercise.
B) The "big tech" companies know this and do not care. They have people who want to work there lined up out the door. The whiteboard interview is setup to minimize false positives.
C) The above argument can possibly be made in favor of the pair programming/"do what you'll actually be doing" type of interview and with even less false negatives, but frankly those interviews are harder and more time consuming on the interviewer(s). Additionally, the whiteboard panel gives 5-6 people time to meet and speak with the candidate instead of 1-2 which helps to mitigate the effects of any personal biases that might be present.
Tl;Dr - the whiteboard interviews actually work well when you have a giant pool of potentials and only optimize for minimizing false positives.
- nulltype 11y agoPart B there is why I suspect this tech talent shortage is not as real as it's made out to be. If there was a shortage, they would totally care.
- rco8786 11y agoI don't know if it's necessarily mutually exclusive. It's only a handful of company's that can afford to do this sort of interviewing. Judging by the amount of recruiter activity in my email/LinkedIn I'd say there's plenty of non "big tech" companies out there that are really struggling to find people.
- jdmichal 11y agoJust because I have enough food on my table does not mean that no one is starving.
- jdmichal 11y ago> The "big tech" companies know this and do not care. They have people who want to work there lined up out the door. Also importantly, the big companies seem to purposefully have a short memory to help counteract this. The chances you even interview in the same division are relatively low, much less with the same team. So why not let people try again and again and again? If they really are good, they'll eventually find a fit and get in.
- rco8786 11y agoYep, I made note of that in my OP as well :) edit oops, no I didn't. I had a note about it originally but deleted before posting. Either way, that is correct.
- jwoah12 11y agoTotally agree that the aim is to minimize false positives. although I think you could devise the pair programming type interview to still allow for 1 hour chunks with many different people doing the sessions. A good phone screen should be able to filter out candidates who obviously don't have the foundation, and watching them code in a (semi)realistic environment can tease out things like resourcefulness, search IQ, etc. I find those things to be better indicators than the ability to find the distance between two nodes in a binary tree.
- rco8786 11y ago> I think you could devise the pair programming type interview to still allow for 1 hour chunks I try and do my interviews this way. While I am required to use the whiteboard and the interviewee is required to write on it, I try to make it as clear as possible that we can brainstorm/strategize on the problem together. Of course I've asked the same few questions probably 100 times now and have seen them solved every which way so I have to play a little dumb sometimes. Same problem occurs in a "real" pair programming environment too, though. Interviewing is hard, and it's easy to throw stones at companies who don't do it the way you want it done.
- vonmoltke 11y ago> The whiteboard interview is setup to minimize false positives. I have yet to see evidence that it actually does this. Everything I have seen so far is of the form, "$BIG_COMPANY does whiteboard interviews, $BIG_COMPANY hires few bad people, therefore whiteboard interviews minimize false positives". The problem is, that says nothing about the effect the whiteboard interview has on doing this. Would the rate change if it were removed? Would the change make the rate worse or better?
- thedufer 11y agoAnecdotally, we switched up our process some in an attempt to be able to hire faster (mostly by avoiding false negatives). It used to be standard whiteboard style; we switched to a mix of that and more real-work style interviews. False positives went up pretty significantly, and even after shedding those the general quality was of hires was a bit lower.
- Alyoshi 11y agoHow long did you keep the new practices before reverting? Any company making this change could run into the issue of interviewers being well practiced at getting meaningful information out of whiteboard interviews and inexperienced at getting meaningful information out of real-work style interviews. Additionally, hiring successful whiteboard interviewees may actually select for people who are better at getting meaningful information out of whiteboard interviews and in turn perpetuate the relative effectiveness of solutions that are less effective in absolute. Which would bring us back to the problem being one of company culture. And this is a case where it is particularly expensive to fix it.
- thedufer 11y agoWe didn't revert. I've since left, but they're still using the newer method. I believe the decrease in time to fill positions was determined to be worth the decrease in quality. It's been over a year - maybe 2.
- mellery451 11y agoit's the false positives that worry me more - that is, the well-practiced whiteboard coder who cannot actually design a maintainable system or the sociopath or brilliant jerk who nobody can stand to work with.
- tokipin 11y agoit's a simple idea in theory, but the reality of these things is a different beast, in particular that these tests form a filter not just in terms of degree, but also in terms of kind. this is why Google is Google and is extreme in both its strengths and weaknesses. what i'm curious about is how Apple weathers these particular waters, since they have more to lose than any of the other big companies ever had. hehehe.