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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 a

by 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.
- exDM69 10y ago
  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.
falsedan 10y ago
> But it's a good binary indicator of whether they possess any coding skills Also: can you discuss technical issues with them? Code quality feedback, finding bugs, explaining their thought processes, acknowledging mistakes, etc. Imagine they're part of your team, and you come to them with a problem you're stuck on. Do you come away with a positive experience, and closer to a solution?
PaulRivers 10y ago
"Whenever I've had a whiteboard programming interview, it's always been a trivial problem" I've had a few, and it's never trivial problems. Here's a trivial problem: - Write a method that takes 2 parameters - an Integer, and a list of Integers - and return a boolean indicating if the int param is in the list of Integers. Instead of something actually simple like that, it's trick questions designed to appeal to the interviewers desire to appear smart and clever.

by exDM69 10y ago

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.

exDM69 10y ago
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.

falsedan 10y ago

> But it's a good binary indicator of whether they possess any coding skills Also: can you discuss technical issues with them? Code quality feedback, finding bugs, explaining their thought processes, acknowledging mistakes, etc. Imagine they're part of your team, and you come to them with a problem you're stuck on. Do you come away with a positive experience, and closer to a solution?

PaulRivers 10y ago

"Whenever I've had a whiteboard programming interview, it's always been a trivial problem" I've had a few, and it's never trivial problems. Here's a trivial problem: - Write a method that takes 2 parameters - an Integer, and a list of Integers - and return a boolean indicating if the int param is in the list of Integers. Instead of something actually simple like that, it's trick questions designed to appeal to the interviewers desire to appear smart and clever.