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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 p

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 reality of programming is, these days everyone Google's their problems. Sometimes you end up at StackOverflow or sometimes you find yourself on a random blog or official documentation. Occasionally you ask a coworker for help, but the ego a lot of developers have to be smart means most feel intimidated to do so. And sometimes you just bang your head against your desk until things start working. Whiteboard and highly technical interviews that expect you to know high-level computer science concepts are tilted in the favour of graduates who are freshly minted from whatever respective educational institution they graduated from.

ori_b 10y ago
> 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? Yesterday. Although, usually I pull out a notebook instead, and work things out with colleagues (or on my own) on paper at my desk. That happens several times a day.
- baddox 10y ago
  I scribble in notebooks a lot too, but it's very rarely anything resembling pseudocode or any representation of the actual algorithm I'm working on. It's usually just a todo list, with occasional things heavily underlined so I don't forget them. I often do something similar at the end of the day if I need to remind myself where I left off. For me, it's not at all comparable to whiteboard coding.
listentojohan 10y ago
Last week. I have to admit that I used a whiteboard for solving a programming problem a few times. But most often, if I have to note down the problem (structure), I'll use a notebook or texteditor. Then on to the Googling.
SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
I use whiteboards all the time. The thing is, the timelines are completely different -- in real life, we usually write the problem down, work out obvious details and a plan of attack, then come back to it hours or days later when people have had time to research and think. Never have I had a coworker interrupt me after 15 seconds to "say what I'm thinking about" any time I pause narrating. In real life, going "hmmm" and taking a couple minutes is acceptable. And you have people being constructive during those times, instead of interrupting you.
exDM69 10y ago
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 home project or anything bigger. The only time I've been given a take-home assignment I refused to do it because I was extremely busy at that time (finals at uni). The employer gave me an offer anyway. Someone else made a better offer, though (based on a whiteboard session). The whiteboard is not a good way to assess the level of programming skill of an individual. But it's a good binary indicator of whether they possess any coding skills. If the result is yes and their resume is good, experience is relevant and maybe there's some GitHub or other code they can share, that should be enough to consider a person to be an able programmer. Like any tool, the whiteboard can be misused. The task should be rather trivial and the time should be short. The purpose should be to weed out the people who have faked their resumes or are applying to programming jobs even though their talent is something entirely different.
- baddox 10y ago
  > 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 had an interview over two afternoons with 5 or 6 different whiteboard coding challenges, each around half an hour and each much more substantial than a smoke test. They were things like parsing and evaluating a string with a simple arithmetic expression like "2+3*4+5" or taking a phone number and enumerating every possible alphabetic representation (2 is "a" "b" or "c", etc.). Google has example whiteboard interview questions on YouTube, and one of them was writing a function in C++ that takes an array of integers and a target integer and calculates whether some subset of the array sums to the target integer. Not the most difficult things ever, but hardly smoke tests, and pretty annoying to whiteboard in my opinion.
_pmf_ 10y ago
> 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.
mikulas_florek 10y ago
Everything depends on the project (e.g. programming games is different than making web apps), but: > When was the last time you can honestly say you used a whiteboard to solve a programming problem Every time there is some interesting hard problem which I want to share with the team. We used whiteboards almost daily. > Googling and ending at a StackOverflow question with a great answer I google like 5% of stuff I do, because: * a lot of time is spent on debugging and you just can't google why your program crashes on in file X on line Y * a lot of stuff is too easy and there is no need for me to google it * architecture - you usually can't google "how do I architect system X"
- rimliu 10y ago
  > We used whiteboards almost daily. For coding or for displaying parts/relationships between parts. We do use whiteboards. We never write code on them.
Grue3 10y ago
Not whiteboard, but I do doodle on paper to find a solution to a problem all the time. It's silly to assume that the problems that I deal with have already been dealt with by somebody else. Who needs programmers anyway if you can simply Google everything? How can you justify the wages of programmers who can't solve new problems on their own?

ori_b 10y ago

> 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? Yesterday. Although, usually I pull out a notebook instead, and work things out with colleagues (or on my own) on paper at my desk. That happens several times a day.

baddox 10y ago
I scribble in notebooks a lot too, but it's very rarely anything resembling pseudocode or any representation of the actual algorithm I'm working on. It's usually just a todo list, with occasional things heavily underlined so I don't forget them. I often do something similar at the end of the day if I need to remind myself where I left off. For me, it's not at all comparable to whiteboard coding.

listentojohan 10y ago

Last week. I have to admit that I used a whiteboard for solving a programming problem a few times. But most often, if I have to note down the problem (structure), I'll use a notebook or texteditor. Then on to the Googling.

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago

I use whiteboards all the time. The thing is, the timelines are completely different -- in real life, we usually write the problem down, work out obvious details and a plan of attack, then come back to it hours or days later when people have had time to research and think. Never have I had a coworker interrupt me after 15 seconds to "say what I'm thinking about" any time I pause narrating. In real life, going "hmmm" and taking a couple minutes is acceptable. And you have people being constructive during those times, instead of interrupting you.

exDM69 10y ago

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 home project or anything bigger. The only time I've been given a take-home assignment I refused to do it because I was extremely busy at that time (finals at uni). The employer gave me an offer anyway. Someone else made a better offer, though (based on a whiteboard session). The whiteboard is not a good way to assess the level of programming skill of an individual. But it's a good binary indicator of whether they possess any coding skills. If the result is yes and their resume is good, experience is relevant and maybe there's some GitHub or other code they can share, that should be enough to consider a person to be an able programmer. Like any tool, the whiteboard can be misused. The task should be rather trivial and the time should be short. The purpose should be to weed out the people who have faked their resumes or are applying to programming jobs even though their talent is something entirely different.

baddox 10y ago
> 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 had an interview over two afternoons with 5 or 6 different whiteboard coding challenges, each around half an hour and each much more substantial than a smoke test. They were things like parsing and evaluating a string with a simple arithmetic expression like "2+3*4+5" or taking a phone number and enumerating every possible alphabetic representation (2 is "a" "b" or "c", etc.). Google has example whiteboard interview questions on YouTube, and one of them was writing a function in C++ that takes an array of integers and a target integer and calculates whether some subset of the array sums to the target integer. Not the most difficult things ever, but hardly smoke tests, and pretty annoying to whiteboard in my opinion.

_pmf_ 10y ago

> 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.

mikulas_florek 10y ago

Everything depends on the project (e.g. programming games is different than making web apps), but: > When was the last time you can honestly say you used a whiteboard to solve a programming problem Every time there is some interesting hard problem which I want to share with the team. We used whiteboards almost daily. > Googling and ending at a StackOverflow question with a great answer I google like 5% of stuff I do, because: * a lot of time is spent on debugging and you just can't google why your program crashes on in file X on line Y * a lot of stuff is too easy and there is no need for me to google it * architecture - you usually can't google "how do I architect system X"

rimliu 10y ago
> We used whiteboards almost daily. For coding or for displaying parts/relationships between parts. We do use whiteboards. We never write code on them.

Grue3 10y ago

Not whiteboard, but I do doodle on paper to find a solution to a problem all the time. It's silly to assume that the problems that I deal with have already been dealt with by somebody else. Who needs programmers anyway if you can simply Google everything? How can you justify the wages of programmers who can't solve new problems on their own?