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Yeah and that's fine, you probably get enough candidates willing to grind through it anyway if you're at The Big 4. Interviewing is a two-way street though so o

Yeah and that's fine, you probably get enough candidates willing to grind through it anyway if you're at The Big 4. Interviewing is a two-way street though so obviously I am going to have it color my decision process. I want to know what challenges actually happen on the job and if I can solve those challenges, and if you ask me to code up a shortest path algorithm on a whiteboard but that never appears on the job, then it seems like a pointless test to me. Compare this to other companies, both large and small who have asked more reasonable challenges such as; "set up MySQL master/slave replication," "write a script that parses a text file in Python," "build a 2-tier architecture through terraform," "troubleshoot these issues on a broken server." Obviously these aren't as fancy as "implement an algorithm on a whiteboard," but it shows me as a candidate/potential candidate what type of problems to expect on the job. As a DevOps person I don't believe in whiteboarding for interviews, nor do I believe it should be a thing for devs, but if a company prefers to interview with this method like Facebook and Google (have received study material for both), I'll continue to focus on the companies who are practical about interviewing instead as it's worked out fine so far for my career path.

wutbrodo 9y ago
> Compare this to other companies, both large and small who have asked more reasonable challenges such as; "set up MySQL master/slave replication," "write a script that parses a text file in Python," "build a 2-tier architecture through terraform," "troubleshoot these issues on a broken server." See to me, these are _terrible_ interview questions because they reward memorization and rote knowledge and completely leave aside the kind of creative problem-solving skills that I've always needed from my employees and colleagues. I've had the misfortune to work with people hired by the process you describe, and they tend to suck pretty hard. If you want cogs that can't adapt beyond their very narrow comfort zone, you've just described exactly how to get them. I agree with your description of the two-way street, but I generally take care of that by leaving time for the candidate to ask questions, generally guided a little by me to give them an idea of the stack we work on, what kind of problems generally need solving, etc. (In fact, I warned the 9/10 guy that I described above that he may not be challenged enough by the work that we'd likely have for him).
- autotune 9y ago
  That can still be fixed by having them set up a service that they have never seen before. Like "oh, you have MySQL experience only? Let's see you set up Postgres," or whatever database service is different from their resume or something along those lines, which is also something that actually happens on the job. It just doesn't make sense to me that white boarding is seen as "creative problem-solving skills" when it is literally the exact opposite of how you would solve a problem in the real world 99 percent of the time.

wutbrodo 9y ago

> Compare this to other companies, both large and small who have asked more reasonable challenges such as; "set up MySQL master/slave replication," "write a script that parses a text file in Python," "build a 2-tier architecture through terraform," "troubleshoot these issues on a broken server." See to me, these are _terrible_ interview questions because they reward memorization and rote knowledge and completely leave aside the kind of creative problem-solving skills that I've always needed from my employees and colleagues. I've had the misfortune to work with people hired by the process you describe, and they tend to suck pretty hard. If you want cogs that can't adapt beyond their very narrow comfort zone, you've just described exactly how to get them. I agree with your description of the two-way street, but I generally take care of that by leaving time for the candidate to ask questions, generally guided a little by me to give them an idea of the stack we work on, what kind of problems generally need solving, etc. (In fact, I warned the 9/10 guy that I described above that he may not be challenged enough by the work that we'd likely have for him).

autotune 9y ago
That can still be fixed by having them set up a service that they have never seen before. Like "oh, you have MySQL experience only? Let's see you set up Postgres," or whatever database service is different from their resume or something along those lines, which is also something that actually happens on the job. It just doesn't make sense to me that white boarding is seen as "creative problem-solving skills" when it is literally the exact opposite of how you would solve a problem in the real world 99 percent of the time.