34 ms·

Whats funny about WBIs is that if you decide for yourself during the interview that this is not the company for you- you can derail the conversation into unfami

Whats funny about WBIs is that if you decide for yourself during the interview that this is not the company for you- you can derail the conversation into unfamiliar territory's and watch the interviewers struggle.

blueplanet200 9y ago
Why is that funny? Most interviewers are just doing what their company asked them, to give a whiteboarding problem to a potential candidate and figure out if they're worth hiring based on that. I agree the process sucks and it's a hoop to jump through, but why take it out on the interviewer?
- dkarapetyan 9y ago
  Because they are complicit. Saying they're just doing their job is not an excuse for propagating exclusionary and low signal interview practices.
  - izacus 9y ago
    "Exclusionary?" Seriously? I didn't know you're entitled to a job.
    - Will_Parker 9y ago
      Notice how it's a whiteboard and not a board of colour.
      - dkarapetyan 9y ago
        There are blackboards as well. Color or ethnicity of the board is not the problem.
        GhostVII 9y ago
        But whiteboards are far overrepresented. Definitely an issue.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - lr4444lr 9y ago
    What part of the interview process doesn't have a purposeful exclusionary element? You're trying to weed out unsuitable candidates.
    - dkarapetyan 9y ago
      Better ways to do that than spend 5 hours in front of a whiteboard. Never gone through a whiteboard interview and then thought to myself that was time well spent, neither on the interviewer nor interviewee side. I've written integer programs, ray tracing simulation software for fields of heliostats, custom orchestration tools and deployment pipelines, etc. and not once has anything said or done during a whiteboard interview been relevant to any of it. The actual job is pretty much orthogonal to whatever the interviewer thinks they are figuring out during a whiteboard interview and as above the stuff I've worked on goes over the heads of 90% of the programmer population so 9/10 they can't and are not qualified to judge things properly but somehow they still think through the magic of the whiteboard they'll divine the candidate's true capabilities. When working on hard problems I go to the library and don't stand in front of a whiteboard to see if I'm smart enough to reinvent some wheel. Chances are someone else has already figured it out and I just need to read some paper and then implement it. If they haven't figured it out then that means the problem is harder than I thought and will either need to rethink my approach entirely or spend my time on something else. Unless of course the job is to stand in front of a whiteboard and wave furiously, in which case you should be using a whiteboard to interview.
  - GhostVII 9y ago
    Doing their job is a perfect excuse for doing a whiteboard problem during an interview. If the company has standards for interviews, you should follow them, it would be pretty arrogant to just do it a different way because you think you know better than the standards.
    - Pica_soO 9y ago
      Thats a missunderstanding on what standards are. Standards are minimal levels to fullfill- everyone is free to surpass them. And the first sentence of any well written standard is- "This rules may not apply universally, use your brain in case of emergencys". I get that its a horrible thing for some to consider that there is creative freedom involved in work and not everything in life follows exact and well defined rules. Anything else, is just holding humanity back. I ve seen standards written by assembly programmers, still alive and walking the earth, torturing hundreds and undead for ever, because what is once set in motion. Really good standards, standardize intentions. "Every Programm shall consists of layers and components. Every component shall be sperated by a interface." A bad standard tells you how the interface has to look like- every time.
- tutufan 9y ago
  There is kind of a symmetry to it. Get a question that the asker has studied and watch the answerer squirm. Seems like it'd be more fun, and probably more insightful, to take turns... :-)
  - izacus 9y ago
    Also great way to get marked as "that asshole on the interview". People know each other in the industry.
    - Pica_soO 9y ago
      Yes, one only has to proof competency on those topics once- after that to ask - is intentionally embarrassing.
    - dkarapetyan 9y ago
      So then you're advocating for an appeasement ritual? Most interviewers would rather feel smart than talk to another person as an equal. More than a few times I've seen candidates disqualified because they made the interviewer feel inadequate. Who exactly is the asshole in that case?
      - izacus 9y ago
        No, I'm not advocating for anything like that. But if you want to deliberately make fun or piss off your interviewer, remember that that may have later consequences on your career. Nothing you do is in vacuum and there's no such thing as "just business" when insulting behaviour is involved. (Obviously, this goes both ways, shitty companies tend to have trouble getting good people to interview.)
otoburb 9y ago
>>[...] if you decide for yourself during the interview that this is not the company for you [...] ... then perhaps it's best to let them know and save everybody some time (including your own).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
xyzzyz 9y ago
I do whiteboard interviews at the whiteboard interview Mecca (Google), and detecting the digressions and putting the candidate back on the right track, is one of the skills the interviewers are explicitly trained for.
- scott00 9y ago
  My mental model of how candidates with a CS degree do on a whiteboard interview is something like score = (grade in data structures class) + (grade in algorithms class) - k(time since undergrad) + b(time spent studying for interview). I'm curious if you think that's a good model, and if it is, would it be easier to just look at their grades in those classes, or if you actually care about the amount of time spent studying.
  - nissimk 9y ago
    It's not just the time spent studying, it's the right kind of studying. "Teaching to the test" so to speak. I liken it to my driver's ed class in high school. My teacher wasn't teaching us how to drive, he was teaching us how to pass the test. Every single thing he taught us was about how to pass the test. I passed on my first try because I was very well trained. Unfortunately, the whiteboard thing is not as standardized, so it's somewhat harder to teach to the test, but it is not impossible. People waste a lot of time I think when they can memorize a small number of basic algorithms and then learn to map the question given to one of those techniques. But writing the code with a marker on a board definitely takes practice as well. The available training materials are good, but they are not great. A focus on shortcuts would be nice. I remember my verbal SAT improving significantly just from the single tip to read the reading comprehension questions before reading the passage. I suspect there are similar tips that can improve your speed at figuring out the trick that solves these interview problems quickly.
  - xyzzyz 9y ago
    There's a huge variance between different schools, and an average grade from one university may be better than good grade from some different one. Additionally, I don't really ask questions that require some particular knowledge from algorithm classes -- it would be silly to determine whether someone is a good hire based on whether they remember details of, say, Hopcroft-Karp algorithm. On the other hand, many algorithm classes are all about this kind of stuff. So, I generally feel like it makes more sense to try to determine the actual aptitude when you have an opportunity, instead of trying to measure it by possible decades old proxy with huge and unknown variance. If you had good grade and/or spent some time studying for the interview, and really meet the hiring bar, you'll most likely do well in the interviews anyway. There's some noise in the process, and good qualified candidates are sometimes rejected, but from company's perspective, it's better to have some false negatives, than to give another metric that can be easily gamed, and get false positives. Google has enough qualified candidates applying for a job to make it not that big of a deal if you lose some due to the noise.

blueplanet200 9y ago

Why is that funny? Most interviewers are just doing what their company asked them, to give a whiteboarding problem to a potential candidate and figure out if they're worth hiring based on that. I agree the process sucks and it's a hoop to jump through, but why take it out on the interviewer?

dkarapetyan 9y ago
Because they are complicit. Saying they're just doing their job is not an excuse for propagating exclusionary and low signal interview practices.
- izacus 9y ago
  "Exclusionary?" Seriously? I didn't know you're entitled to a job.
  - Will_Parker 9y ago
    Notice how it's a whiteboard and not a board of colour.
    - dkarapetyan 9y ago
      There are blackboards as well. Color or ethnicity of the board is not the problem.
      - GhostVII 9y ago
        But whiteboards are far overrepresented. Definitely an issue.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- lr4444lr 9y ago
  What part of the interview process doesn't have a purposeful exclusionary element? You're trying to weed out unsuitable candidates.
  - dkarapetyan 9y ago
    Better ways to do that than spend 5 hours in front of a whiteboard. Never gone through a whiteboard interview and then thought to myself that was time well spent, neither on the interviewer nor interviewee side. I've written integer programs, ray tracing simulation software for fields of heliostats, custom orchestration tools and deployment pipelines, etc. and not once has anything said or done during a whiteboard interview been relevant to any of it. The actual job is pretty much orthogonal to whatever the interviewer thinks they are figuring out during a whiteboard interview and as above the stuff I've worked on goes over the heads of 90% of the programmer population so 9/10 they can't and are not qualified to judge things properly but somehow they still think through the magic of the whiteboard they'll divine the candidate's true capabilities. When working on hard problems I go to the library and don't stand in front of a whiteboard to see if I'm smart enough to reinvent some wheel. Chances are someone else has already figured it out and I just need to read some paper and then implement it. If they haven't figured it out then that means the problem is harder than I thought and will either need to rethink my approach entirely or spend my time on something else. Unless of course the job is to stand in front of a whiteboard and wave furiously, in which case you should be using a whiteboard to interview.
- GhostVII 9y ago
  Doing their job is a perfect excuse for doing a whiteboard problem during an interview. If the company has standards for interviews, you should follow them, it would be pretty arrogant to just do it a different way because you think you know better than the standards.
  - Pica_soO 9y ago
    Thats a missunderstanding on what standards are. Standards are minimal levels to fullfill- everyone is free to surpass them. And the first sentence of any well written standard is- "This rules may not apply universally, use your brain in case of emergencys". I get that its a horrible thing for some to consider that there is creative freedom involved in work and not everything in life follows exact and well defined rules. Anything else, is just holding humanity back. I ve seen standards written by assembly programmers, still alive and walking the earth, torturing hundreds and undead for ever, because what is once set in motion. Really good standards, standardize intentions. "Every Programm shall consists of layers and components. Every component shall be sperated by a interface." A bad standard tells you how the interface has to look like- every time.
tutufan 9y ago
There is kind of a symmetry to it. Get a question that the asker has studied and watch the answerer squirm. Seems like it'd be more fun, and probably more insightful, to take turns... :-)
- izacus 9y ago
  Also great way to get marked as "that asshole on the interview". People know each other in the industry.
  - Pica_soO 9y ago
    Yes, one only has to proof competency on those topics once- after that to ask - is intentionally embarrassing.
  - dkarapetyan 9y ago
    So then you're advocating for an appeasement ritual? Most interviewers would rather feel smart than talk to another person as an equal. More than a few times I've seen candidates disqualified because they made the interviewer feel inadequate. Who exactly is the asshole in that case?
    - izacus 9y ago
      No, I'm not advocating for anything like that. But if you want to deliberately make fun or piss off your interviewer, remember that that may have later consequences on your career. Nothing you do is in vacuum and there's no such thing as "just business" when insulting behaviour is involved. (Obviously, this goes both ways, shitty companies tend to have trouble getting good people to interview.)

otoburb 9y ago

>>[...] if you decide for yourself during the interview that this is not the company for you [...] ... then perhaps it's best to let them know and save everybody some time (including your own).

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

xyzzyz 9y ago

I do whiteboard interviews at the whiteboard interview Mecca (Google), and detecting the digressions and putting the candidate back on the right track, is one of the skills the interviewers are explicitly trained for.

scott00 9y ago
My mental model of how candidates with a CS degree do on a whiteboard interview is something like score = (grade in data structures class) + (grade in algorithms class) - k(time since undergrad) + b(time spent studying for interview). I'm curious if you think that's a good model, and if it is, would it be easier to just look at their grades in those classes, or if you actually care about the amount of time spent studying.
- nissimk 9y ago
  It's not just the time spent studying, it's the right kind of studying. "Teaching to the test" so to speak. I liken it to my driver's ed class in high school. My teacher wasn't teaching us how to drive, he was teaching us how to pass the test. Every single thing he taught us was about how to pass the test. I passed on my first try because I was very well trained. Unfortunately, the whiteboard thing is not as standardized, so it's somewhat harder to teach to the test, but it is not impossible. People waste a lot of time I think when they can memorize a small number of basic algorithms and then learn to map the question given to one of those techniques. But writing the code with a marker on a board definitely takes practice as well. The available training materials are good, but they are not great. A focus on shortcuts would be nice. I remember my verbal SAT improving significantly just from the single tip to read the reading comprehension questions before reading the passage. I suspect there are similar tips that can improve your speed at figuring out the trick that solves these interview problems quickly.
- xyzzyz 9y ago
  There's a huge variance between different schools, and an average grade from one university may be better than good grade from some different one. Additionally, I don't really ask questions that require some particular knowledge from algorithm classes -- it would be silly to determine whether someone is a good hire based on whether they remember details of, say, Hopcroft-Karp algorithm. On the other hand, many algorithm classes are all about this kind of stuff. So, I generally feel like it makes more sense to try to determine the actual aptitude when you have an opportunity, instead of trying to measure it by possible decades old proxy with huge and unknown variance. If you had good grade and/or spent some time studying for the interview, and really meet the hiring bar, you'll most likely do well in the interviews anyway. There's some noise in the process, and good qualified candidates are sometimes rejected, but from company's perspective, it's better to have some false negatives, than to give another metric that can be easily gamed, and get false positives. Google has enough qualified candidates applying for a job to make it not that big of a deal if you lose some due to the noise.