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> there's no good way to independently evaluate people's > abilities And all WBI let you do is to evaluate someone's ability to do WBI.
by rimliu 9y ago
> there's no good way to independently evaluate people's
> abilities
And all WBI let you do is to evaluate someone's ability to do WBI.
- opportune 9y agoI'd argue that there is a not-insignificant amount of overlap between whiteboarding and coding. Most coding in practice is not as "algorithmic" (in the sense that the problems are theoretically challenging) but having the knowledge and know-how of how to write optimal/efficient algorithms will definitely be echoed throughout any code you write. In addition, in my experience most WBI are not particularly challenging problems that you have probably never seen before. I mentioned the ability to extract a path from a DFS; I would argue that this is such a basic CS skill that being unable to solve that problem indicates an insufficient amount of knowledge of CS. There are definitely WBI that are poorly matched with real job requirements and knowledge. I think these are often seen at smaller companies trying to copy FB/Google without knowing what they are doing. WBI that involve using important CS constructs such as a binary tree or a directed graph IMO are testing important concepts
- pebers 9y agoSure, but you could make that argument about anything you ask candidates in interviews. At some point you have to ask something that attempts to evaluate their performance in an interview timespan. On the other hand, people's performance in whiteboard interviews may positively correlate with later performance as employees. In which case they let you make a reasonable assumption about later performance without being able to evaluate it directly, which is really what interviews are all about.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]