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> Said space shuttle firmware engineer probably never had to solve a pop-quiz problem on a whiteboard. It's much more likely that he/she deliberated for weeks a
by eadmund 9y ago
> Said space shuttle firmware engineer probably never had to solve a pop-quiz problem on a whiteboard. It's much more likely that he/she deliberated for weeks about a simple change with the rest of their team, and perhaps even with the person/astronaut they might kill if the change had a bad bug.
> Who cares if this person can't solve fizz-buzz on the whiteboard? That's probably not even a relevant skill to the job opening you're filling, or a skill they have ever needed to hone or practice.
Thing is, shuttle-style development is also probably not even a relevant skill to the job opening he's filling. Odds are, that job requires something more akin to FizzBuzz ('I want to do something. How do I do it?') than to shuttle-firmware.
- ereyes01 9y agoThe point I'm trying to make is that solving a fizz-buzz-like pop quiz on the board is a very different skill from sitting at a desk with internet access and collaborating with team members to solve an engineering problem, even if they reduce to fizz-buzz-like solutions. For this reason, the whiteboard pop-quizzes are not really useful in evaluating how well the candidate will perform on the job. I've worked with terrible team members that have aced their interviews / exams, and I've worked with amazing engineers who crashed and burned spectacularly in their interviews and do so regularly. Also, another thing to consider is how this kind of interview encounter negatively affects diversity and the experience of candidates from different cultural backgrounds. If we treat this form of interview a sort of hazing experience that doesn't really inform on their aptitude on the job, what kind of traits does this process _actually_ select for? Would be an interesting study.