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I have a question for interviewers: how much, if any, white boarding do you have the interviewee do for a front end junior position? And what are you looking f

I have a question for interviewers: how much, if any, white boarding do you have the interviewee do for a front end junior position? And what are you looking for - memorization of common problems/solutions? ability to think through problem? something else? As someone who has pretty poor memorization and does poor on tests in general - this portion of interviewing gives me the most anxiety.

thomascgalvin 9y ago
We don't use any whiteboarding questions. There is a coding component of our interview process, but it's all done on a laptop. Our goal is to test like you work, so you have an IDE, access to Google and StackOverflow, and when we ask you to implement an algorithm (like QuickSort) we link to the Wikipedia page in the instructions. We've found that the ability to memorize is basically useless is identifying good candidates, but the ability to implement when given proper instructions is really valuable.
- nxsynonym 9y ago
  This is what I was hoping to hear! Thanks for replying.
  - skylark 9y ago
    The parent provided one datapoint - his company. But I can tell you from personal experience that this is not the norm (at least in San Francisco.) I've interviewed at a wide variety of companies and I can't even remember the last time I wasn't asked to whiteboard. Pretty much every company you've heard of uses a similar technical phone screen -> onsite with whiteboarding process. If you're not somewhat proficient at them, you're greatly limiting yourself.
  - slysf 9y ago
    At many bay area startups I've worked for we would do whiteboarding sessions but I would stress that the candidate "treat me like google". I would actively encourage them to ask questions of the type they'd look up, to be comfortable being collaborative. This to me showed much more about a candidate's ability to work on a team, learn quickly, and apply what they've learned than any whiteboard session entirely from memory could prove. This becomes even more important the further out of school a candidate is; some of us took algorithm classes decades ago.

thomascgalvin 9y ago

We don't use any whiteboarding questions. There is a coding component of our interview process, but it's all done on a laptop. Our goal is to test like you work, so you have an IDE, access to Google and StackOverflow, and when we ask you to implement an algorithm (like QuickSort) we link to the Wikipedia page in the instructions. We've found that the ability to memorize is basically useless is identifying good candidates, but the ability to implement when given proper instructions is really valuable.

nxsynonym 9y ago
This is what I was hoping to hear! Thanks for replying.
- skylark 9y ago
  The parent provided one datapoint - his company. But I can tell you from personal experience that this is not the norm (at least in San Francisco.) I've interviewed at a wide variety of companies and I can't even remember the last time I wasn't asked to whiteboard. Pretty much every company you've heard of uses a similar technical phone screen -> onsite with whiteboarding process. If you're not somewhat proficient at them, you're greatly limiting yourself.
- slysf 9y ago
  At many bay area startups I've worked for we would do whiteboarding sessions but I would stress that the candidate "treat me like google". I would actively encourage them to ask questions of the type they'd look up, to be comfortable being collaborative. This to me showed much more about a candidate's ability to work on a team, learn quickly, and apply what they've learned than any whiteboard session entirely from memory could prove. This becomes even more important the further out of school a candidate is; some of us took algorithm classes decades ago.