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Show HN: Whiteboardfree – Developer Jobs at Companies That Don't Whiteboard

396 points by vbordo 8y ago

exelius 8y ago
Don’t whiteboard during interviews? Or don’t whiteboard at all? Dropping the former is good, the latter is bad...
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sanxiyn 8y ago
Whiteboard rhymes with waterboard.
- nickthemagicman 8y ago
  ish
  - unit91 8y ago
    Makes me wonder where he's from. Maybe with a South African accent or similar. They sound very different with my Ohio accent though.
ddtaylor 8y ago
I was just speaking with a co-worker about how I consider this interview culture to be a race to the bottom in how much unpaid work companies are getting from prospective employees. When I interviewed with Facebook they do back to back whiteboard interviews for about 6+ hours then sometimes they give "homework" problems, etc. Even skilled candidates can't refuse because a less skilled candidate will come along willing to make the sacrifice. I don't have any solutions only complaints and bitterness, sorry.
- bgribble 8y ago
  At my startup we pay interviewees a decent hourly consulting rate for take-home problems or full-day followup onsites (after the first interview). We only do them when we are pretty excited about a candidate but need more information to make a hiring decision. It's cheap, really, considering the cost of sourcing candidates and the cost of making a bad hiring decision.
  - rrdharan 8y ago
    Interesting and the first I’ve heard of this and the first confirmation I’ve heard that cost-wise it’s not egregious to do so. It still seems strange to me to pay for throwaway work but I can also see how that’s really just my personal sentiment / bias and this is probably a pretty good and balanced approach.
    - pc86 8y ago
      Except some of us already have full-time jobs and don't want to spend the weekend working on quizzes, whether it's paid or not. And unless you're very generous with timing taking a day off of work can be a logistical issue, not just a pay issue. This type of interview self-selects for people with fewer family/non-work obligations, who are willing and able to spend their free time still programming.
      - pault 8y ago
        Sometimes you might have to inconvenience yourself to improve your career.
        Clubber 8y ago
        Ya, if you paid double market rates, I'd do it. I suspect most people who do this sort of thing probably pay market or worse.
      - dfee 8y ago
        Cost of doing business. Not willing to put in your free time? No need to worry about getting a new job. Are you also job hunting at work, doing interviews on your employers time, etc?
danpalmer 8y ago
Might be worth clarifying whether this is “don’t use a whiteboard during interviews” or “don’t ask candidates to code obscure algorithms” on a whiteboard. We use a whiteboard in our interviews for sketching UI, and sometimes drawing a database table. Generally candidates find this much easier than talking through their design, and we think that interview very closely represents what we do on a day to day basis.
- gtaylor 8y ago
  I really like them for Infrastructure or systems diagrams, too!
  - mikepurvis 8y ago
    Yeah, that's key. "Explain how your piece fit into the bigger picture— what other things does it talk to, how tightly are they coupled, how are errors propagated, etc."
- jakelazaroff 8y ago
  There was a good article that popped up on here a couple months ago about this: "Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry". [1] If you're asking candidates to balance a binary search tree when no one in the history of your company has ever had to do that, you're asking the wrong questions. [1] http://prog21.dadgum.com/177.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/177.html
  - danpalmer 8y ago
    Yep. Which is why we don’t. We do a mock technical meeting with multiple members of our tech team and the candidate presenting options, talking through pros and cons, etc. Much of the interview is about assessing communication rather than technical skills. The interview is basically a standard tech meeting that we hold regularly in the team to discuss designs of new projects.
    - jakelazaroff 8y ago
yanslookup 8y ago
I recently had an onsite tech screen at a FANG company that requires whiteboard programming. The problem itself wasn't hard but I missed a requirement that was actually a hint. I shutdown and couldn't move on or work through it. That said, I don't think whiteboard programming is always bad but it is a skill that I don't exercise and it showed. My advice, talk through the problem with the interviewer and don't start writing code on the whiteboard until the interviewer has ok'd your proposed solution.
- dominotw 8y ago
  I usually need like good 5-10 minutes of quite time to think about the problem in peace. I just can't seem to do with interviewer staring at me and hounding me to 'think out loud', sorry I can't talk and think at the same time. I have no practise at 'thinking out loud' , i never do it in real life.
  - Double_a_92 8y ago
    Yeah this would maybe only work for simple problems, that one can solve without thinking too far.
  - bradlys 8y ago
    And that's why you have to practice. I was the same but I do a lot better now after having done some 200+ technical interviews and a lot of practice on my own.
    - Clubber 8y ago
      200 technical interviews?! What the hell? You shouldn't have to do 200 in your lifetime. This kinda reminds me of those MCSE certification bootcamps they used to have. They didn't teach you anything useful, they just taught you how to hack the test.
vinayms 8y ago
Comment: I think whiteboards get unnecessary flak when the real culprits are games and riddles. I would argue that using a whiteboard to convey ideas is a fundamental skill if one has to work in a creative team. Question: How do you validate that the posted company or job position doesn't need whiteboard? Is it after the fact, as in a disgruntled candidate complaining? I couldn't find any information about this on the site.
- clarry 8y ago
  > I would argue that using a whiteboard to convey ideas is a fundamental skill if one has to work in a creative team. Yet a lot of people are never really taught to do it. Perhaps they pick up this fundamental skill just fine after a couple whiteboarding sessions in the company. If a company is rejecting candidates for not having a skill that is really easy and quick to obtain, they'd better not be one of these companies that keep complaining about shortage of talent.
nickthemagicman 8y ago
I never realized whiteboarding was an issue. I wish someone would would make one of these sites for open office free jobs.(not the softare)
- fasouto 8y ago
  +1 to this. Even better, I would love a site that classifies job offers/companies by: - Has an onboarding process for new hires - Has quiet working conditions / open office - Has clear requirements - Salary range - Allows remote working - Type of interview and time to get a response
- tom_mellior 8y ago
  StackOverflow's job board has the "Joel Test" part where employers posting jobs can check off the points from https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s... that they fulfill. One of them is "quiet working conditions", which comes close. Before looking it up just now, I could have sworn the point was something like "every developer has a door they can close", but oh well. Anyway, I hoped you could search only for jobs where this box was checked by the company, but apparently not... EDIT: It does allow searching for minimal salary and remote jobs, among the wishes listed in a sibling comment.
  - Clubber 8y ago
    Wow that would really turn the tables; a job board where companies must not only disclose their interviewing practices and durations but their office environment as well. It would be developer centric so developers can pick and choose the companies they want to work for based on often hidden parameters. Just the transparency requirements would automatically filter out most the chaff companies. I might have to build that out of spite. :)
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heckanoobs 8y ago
I still whiteboard my programming question when giving interviews, can someone summarize the case against whiteboards? I'm just looking for the candidate's thought process and some pseudocode. I could do the same thing in an empty text file but the substance of the interview wouldn't change. My feeling right now is that being anti whiteboard is focusing on trivialities like complaining that the office style guide uses Allman vs K&R bracketing or something. But I'm open to having my mind changed if there's something more to it.
- bgribble 8y ago
  I like to use whiteboards for non-coding design questions, like talking through how you would architect an app, drawing DB schema diagrams, etc. It's a tool that we use for collaborating on things like this in the office, so demonstrating an ability to do it is meaningful. Actually hand-writing code with a pen has always seemed weird to me. As a programmer, I compose code with a keyboard. So I give candidates a laptop and use an interactive screensharing tool (I like https://codepad.remoteinterview.io https://codepad.remoteinterview.io) where they can run code in the language of their choice in a browser, and I can watch and talk through the process.
- sidlls 8y ago
  Being anti-whiteboard is a proxy for being against the "regurgitate this CS trivia on a board in front of me" style of interview, not against the use of a whiteboard. Most problems in practice that require non-trivial application of algorithms, dynamic programming and the like have two characteristics that make them differ considerably from whiteboard style quizzes. For one, they're going to be much less contrived (pick a random leetcode question for an example of this, odds are it's contrived). Secondly, they're going to be resolved when developers talk to each other about them and there is recognition of the solution, which most of the time is an application of algorithms and data structures with library implementations. The ability to whiteboard things like "given an array of integers and a target find the indices of the pair of integers in the array that sum to the target" and "find the first missing positive integer in an unsorted array in O(n) time and O(1) space" provides almost no useful information about a candidate's ability to solve an actual problem the company faces in most instances. There are exceptions, but interviewing everyone for the standard of that one exception is asinine.
donttrack 8y ago
I was “surprise whiteboarded” recently. It was my first whiteboard interview and I actually thought it was an interesting experience.
deleted 8y ago
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JTbane 8y ago
Whiteboards are not the problem- rather the questions that candidates are asked are bad. Asking someone to solve an obscure mathematical problem (the Two Egg problem seems to be in fashion) doesn't do much except test whether the candidate has memorized the answer.
- ybrah 8y ago
  Whiteboard problems are used to show that you can work through a problem, while communicating well about your thought process. They're also good general intelligence tests, if administered correctly.
  - sidlls 8y ago
    That they're used for those things doesn't mean they work. They're especially not good general intelligence tests.
    - ybrah 8y ago
      I'd wager that the fact that many high power companies use whiteboards for interviews point to the fact that they're useful.
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        The fact that there are so many successful fast food chains points to the fact that the food is good and healthy.
      - sixstringtheory 8y ago
        This is appealing to authority/popularity. But since we’ve gone there, many high power companies also have a lot of chuckleheads running around.
      - aianus 8y ago
        Maybe they're only useful when you're a high power company with $200k+ total comp and more applicants than you know what to do with.
j7ake 8y ago
Using a whiteboard to give a talk about your project is desirable in my opinion , you might need to be more specific with what is whiteboard free.
zerr 8y ago
What about CS-riddles/competitive programming free companies? Who only ask relevant to the job questions during interviews.
dash_shi 8y ago
Lyft doesn't do whiteboard when hiring engineers?
- denvercoder904 8y ago
  That's the first thing I noticed about the list. I interviewed with Lyft last year and they did whiteboard style interviews. Since when did this change?
  - jhall1468 8y ago
    It didnt. I'd guess they are just pulling in a ton of jobs so they look popular enough to justify the fee to post a job there
ryanong 8y ago
At plated we do two coding interviews. The first is concrete, we have a library that is poorly written and their job is to implement a new feature and refactor it. This is a great interview to understand core skills. The second interview is a modeling exercise where we build an app from scratch with escalating amount of complexity but only asking for what the database and api endpoints would look like.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  This seems pretty reasonable to me.
iothetiger 8y ago
This is great. I suspect the "coding exercises" in interviews are really dominance hierarchy games. It goes against politeness theory and is a threat to an individual's 'negative face' or need for autonomy.
runlevel1 8y ago
Do people hate whiteboarding in general or the questions they're being asked to draw? I can fully understand dislike for puzzles and being asked to implement irrelevant algorithms in pseudo code. The interview should reflect the job being interviewed for. I've found whiteboarding to be mutually helpful in questions about system architecture. Plus, it's something that we actually do on-the-job.
- Clubber 8y ago
  Yes, but you don't write what you expect to be fully functional code on a whiteboard. A whiteboard is good for sharing ideas. Using it to write and assess code is pretty stupid if you step back and think about it. I mean ask yourself this: do you ever use the whiteboard to write code to the extent you expect some poor kid trying to get his first job to do? Hell no, you screen share an IDE or paste code in an email. People used to have to write code on paper (I did this a few times in college ages ago) and that comes from the cost of compiling stuff way back when. Computing time is friggin cheap, that's why no one does it. To expect some new guy to be adept at that ancient practice is silly.
  - runlevel1 8y ago
    I agree. This is a form of the psychological concept of encoding specificity principle[1] which states that recall is most effective when the conditions at the time of encoding match the conditions at the time of retrieval. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encoding_specificity_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encoding_specificity_principle
- pjmlp 8y ago
  For example, what does the ability to reverse an AVL tree on the whiteboard have to do with doing UI design in XAML?
  - doorbumper 8y ago
    UI Design or a Frontend Software Engineer? I'd expect people working on the frontend to just as proficient in time complexity, space complexity, and performance analysis as a backend engineer. I don't particularly gravitate towards companies working in CRUD apps, but single page applications with complex UI flows and data collection can certainly need those abilities. For one, it's not particularly uncommon to have an actual tree in the UI. How would you represent that tree? How are you going to handle it as it grows to thousands of nodes? I think few frontend developers would consider the work they do to be "UI design".
crsv 8y ago
We don't whiteboard at my company, as we favor a take home technical exercise and debrief/walkthrough format for interviewing our engineers. That being said, I'm super turned off by the incessant whining from the community about various interviewing practices. Here's the tough truth I think: Some companies simply do not understand how to properly engage in employee selection. They get some quick guidance from a google search and have too much autonomy in the process to make their own decisions because the company hasn't really empowered their talent processes to be well thought out and planned. This happens frequently. The real shame in it all it that it focuses the conversation on these high level exercises - be it coding on a white board or rallying against take home exercises or demanding to be paid for interview work, and ultimately to the employer you're put in a spot where you can't help but feel a little reactionary as the transactionality of the relationship is constant: I need to know you can do the work, prove to me you can, I will then hire you and pay you to work. What a cluster it's all becoming on the software engineering side.
- jjaredsimpson 8y ago
  I have an interview coming up and the process as described to me is take home exercise with an on site debrief. I am thrilled. I've done whiteboard interviews and some I've aced and some I've crashed an burned. I didn't crash and burn because I didn't know the material. I just froze on a tree traversal question one time. And then the nerves and empty conversation just made the situation snowball as I thought to myself, "OMG I know this why am I taking so long, what is this guy thinking right now." I relish the opportunity to provide useful information for the employer to update their prior.
- Clubber 8y ago
  >I'm super turned off by the incessant whining from the community about various interviewing practices. Wow, what an incredibly tone deaf response. >Some companies simply do not understand how to properly engage in employee selection. Maybe changing this prospective is the point of the "incessant whining." >I need to know you can do the work, prove to me you can, I will then hire you and pay you to work. I'd have to know how you are testing, but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts your method has no way of predicting output in any meaningful way. >What a cluster it's all becoming on the software engineering side. Absolutely. I would say it's endangering the overall quality of the industry. The saying goes, if you are a bad manager or a bad company the first people to leave are the A and B players. The people that will never leave are the C and D players. I suspect people who do all this trivia don't even know what an A or B player looks like.
gayfakenews 8y ago
too many programmers cant program and hurt their fee-fees so a company was made to accept fucking 300$ per ad. Anyone who cant whiteboard or pseudo is fucking retarded.
kazinator 8y ago
How about "night-mode.com": developer jobs at old-school companies that interview with a blackboard and chalk.
ybrah 8y ago
Whiteboard problems work great as a general intelligence test if administered correctly. A well designed whiteboard problem will filter out people of lesser intelligence. This means the people you would be working with would generally be more intelligent. This is not a bad thing. Furthermore, whiteboards are great communication tools. I spend some time on VRChat's whiteboard room teaching people various algorithms, and other abstract things to help me learn. Someone who knows how to use a whiteboard and communicate correctly would be a better hire than someone who doesn't. If the company you work at uses whiteboard problems to vet interviewees, just drill them. With a little practice, you'll have a better chance.
- nunya213 8y ago
  This is so wrong that it actually hurts my brain. Albert Einstein, a certifiable genius probably could not tell you how to invert a binary tree, this has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with how many HackerRank problems you have memorized.
  - recursive 8y ago
    There are many things you can do with a whiteboard other than inverting binary trees. You're thinking too narrowly.
    - nunya213 8y ago
      Obviously, but I was specifically referring to the typical algorithm oriented whiteboard questions found at major tech company interviews. Working a real world problem on a whiteboard I see no issue with.
      - recursive 8y ago
        This whole post is about companies that "don't whiteboard". Not companies that "only whiteboard for real world problems".
  - Melchizedek 8y ago
stephenr 8y ago
Up next: elevator music free jobs. Dev jobs at Companies without that predictable elevator music. Maybe I’m missing the point though.
- jhall1468 8y ago
  The point is "post a job for $xxx". This shit has gotten popular after the success of weworkremotely
rbosinger 8y ago
I had to write a JavaScript program on graph paper (with no computer on hand) as a college test. Then the professor would type them out afterwards with you and try to run it. Whenever I hear about this whiteboarding issue I think of that. It was actually kind of fun in a weird way though. I drew nice curly braces.
- spraak 8y ago
  > I drew nice curly braces. Heh, I code pretty often on paper when I'm working through a design and my style has evolved to just using < and > as proxies for curly braces which saves me time, since trying to draw a nice curly brace takes me so long.
_bxg1 8y ago
...do people really hate whiteboard interviews enough for a website like this to make money?
- strken 8y ago
  Some proportion of perfectly good engineers couldn't pass a whiteboard interview to save their lives, for much the same reason I couldn't pass a job interview that measured communication skills by karaoke performance and emoji literacy.
  - _bxg1 8y ago
    The company needs to evaluate your problem-solving skills though. I mean, I'll admit that writing code on a literal whiteboard is more physically arduous than on a keyboard or even a piece of paper, but if the root issue is live coding challenges themselves, I don't see a way around it. Some companies look at your GitHub profile instead, which imo is much more unfair, because it presumes you've had the free time and the desire to work on side projects, which shouldn't be a requirement for a job. Maybe companies should adopt an either-or policy? Give the interviewer the option to demonstrate their skills in the form that works best for them.
d--b 8y ago
So all of these ask for a 2-week home project?
pulkitsh1234 8y ago
Free alternative: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
hnrodey 8y ago
Am I the only one who thought this post title meant jobs at companies that simply don't use whiteboards in the day-to-day aspect of working?
blauditore 8y ago
What would be a good selection strategy without technical interviews? I've seen people with good CV and reference projects being hired, only to turn out they literally couldn't program. It's old news that sneaking to a CS degree without learning anything substantial is possible, and those are easily debunked in even simple task like solving FizzBuzz on the whiteboard.
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  No whiteboard doesn't mean no technical interview. You can pair up on a real computer, you can have a take home, things like that.
  - blauditore 8y ago
    Both of these have huge disadvantages for interviewing: - When working in front of a computer, people get worse at communicating. Even if they try to speak out their thougts, it usually doesn't work well, as thinking and operating an IDE (or whatever at hand) already occupies a lot of brain capacity. - Take-home exercises are hard to control: You don't know how long a candidate worked on it. Even if there's a target like 4 hours, some might work all night on it - either because they couldn't do it in the allocated time, or because they fear some disadvantage. Apart of that, they might pay someone to solve it for them.
    - actionowl 8y ago
      > Apart of that, they might pay someone to solve it for them. I think that can be solved by having the candidate talk about their solution and how they made certain choices.
- stronglikedan 8y ago
  I love FizzBuzz and am constantly astonished on the amount of candidates it weeds out in the first in-person interview.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
I don't mind whiteboarding. I do mind questions that are puzzles or algorithmic in a way that does not directly reflect the company's current software. I usually (ok, almost always) flesh out designs and pseudocode with pencil and paper anyway, so changing to use a whiteboard isn't an issue. Standing in front of a handful of strangers glaring at me while I try and figure out some stupid algorithm they had to Google themselves is hazing and should be stopped. Edit: Also, dinging me for small syntax issues on a whiteboard when I'm used to using an IDE is not really cool.
lasereyes136 8y ago
This all remains me of a quote I have recently seen: "Most Programmer wouldn't hire themselves" As long as we keep asking people to do things that aren't like the work that we do, we will continue to get mismatches and people that interview well but work poorly. I don't have a great solution, finding good people is hard.
brokenwren 8y ago
I've been using whiteboards for 2 decades during the interview process and they work great, if you ask the right questions. I've built great engineering teams at companies like Orbtiz and whiteboards were one of our best tools. The reason they are important is that they are part of every engineers day-to-day work. We use them to collaborate and design and understand. Therefore, if a candidate can't whiteboard a design, solution, architecture, etc. in a manner that other engineers can understand it, they are going to struggle. That being said, the way Google and other companies use whiteboards is an epic fail. Asking someone to code on a whiteboard is stupid. Asking them to solve algorithm puzzlers on a whiteboard is lame. This isn't how we use whiteboards every day so why should a candidate be expected to use them this way during an interview.
- andrewstuart2 8y ago
  I've legitimately used whiteboards to pseudocode while discussing architecture with teammates plenty of times before. Does it compile? No. But the point is that I can more easily demonstrate the benefits of an approach with some concrete pseudocode to help grok the proposed algorithm. As an aside, if you've never done systems design or pseudocode on a Smartboard, you're really missing out. Copy/paste, duplicating a slide, recalling earlier slides, etc. Man, that's the way to design a system with quick iteration but still no worry of losing your work.
  - Jemmeh 8y ago
    Yes but I think the point is a lot of interviewers do not go for pseudocode. They want syntax perfect solutions on a whiteboard.
    - ianhawes 8y ago
      This. When interviewers feel that the question was not hard enough or that they didn't like the answer, they often fall back on "you're missing a semicolon".
    - brokenwren 8y ago
      Yes. That's essentially what I was getting at. Asking someone to code accurately on a whiteboard is nonsense. When I interviewed at Google, they asked me if my whiteboard code would compile. I said, "give me a laptop and I'll tell you". I don't think they liked that answer. ;)
ivanhoe 8y ago
It would be very useful to be able to filter just the remote positions. Searching for "remote" as a location returns no results, and I can see in the list that some remote positions are being offered.
stefanve 8y ago
My personal experience in hiring is that people should be able to explain concepts in a clear why. So usually I ask to explain an pattern that they say they have experience in. I let him/her choose how they want to explain it whiteboard / pen and paper / words only, sitting or standing. I don't care as long as the person is good in explaining and has a firm grasp of the subject. Both are needed to do a proper job. There are lots of people that are unable to explain MVC in a clear let alone correctly even if they used .NET MVC or spring MVC (or whatever)for 10+ years. After that is seldom useful to ask anything else.. this approach had never failed me.
diabeetusman 8y ago
The Terms of Service page is blank (https://whiteboardfree.com/terms https://whiteboardfree.com/terms)
alpb 8y ago
Aside: With about 40 job postings, each at 300$/month, they're probably making $144k with little to no operational or infrastructure costs. They should be on https://www.indiehackers.com/products https://www.indiehackers.com/products.
curtis 8y ago
I'd much rather code on a whiteboard than do a take-home assignment. I may be in the minority but I rather suspect I'm not the only one. I can understand that some people find whiteboard coding really stressful. I never have, and I have found take-home assignments to be a huge time-sink which typically results in minimal feedback (and sometimes none at all). Maybe the right thing to do is to just give interviewees a choice.
weeksie 8y ago
You know, when I'm interviewing someone my VASTLY preferred approach is to have them walk me through something they've coded that they're proud of. That's not aways possible, but often it is. Give me a good slow walk through your github repo and tell me where and why you made the choices you did, what the tradeoffs were, etc. . . Better than making some poor bastard jump through hoops on problems that only vaguely resemble the ones they'll be solving at work.
- mongol 8y ago
  Yes this is the best method I have found. Let them explain something they have worked on that provides them with experience they believe qualifies them for the position. Here I can surely expect them to have depth, assess their communication skills, be able to explain further on questions from me etc.
justin66 8y ago
I interviewed once at a place where a friend worked as an engineer. She assured me that they didn't do whiteboard questions. Guess what I had to contend with during two different interviews...
innagadadavida 8y ago
There is a Netflix and Lyft post, but going by past experiences there are whiteboard coding problems. Are these companies spamming it? How do they police these possibly fake posts? After all, the thing recruiters care most is how many people apply.
bhuga 8y ago
This is a good idea, although the focus on 'anti-whiteboard' is a bit limiting. It's a shame it's its own site instead of a feature on other sites. There's no interview process that works best for every candidate; some prefer whiteboards or homework or practical debugging on their on computer or hand-wavey design or whatever. Candidates (and companies!) could save a lot of time by letting applicants filter their searches to companies using methods that will let them put their best foot forward.
dahart 8y ago
I'd love to hear alternatives, rather than a list of who doesn't. I don't use whiteboards for coding tests, I use whiteboards as one (of several) ways to evaluate how someone thinks on their feet without having Stack Overflow & Google at their fingertips. I don't only want to know if someone can code, I want to know about their process, how they think about things, what assumptions they start with, and what kinds of things they like to explore. I want to see some personality. Take home problems don't measure that very well, nor do coding tests with online resources available. I've never met a perfect interview, but what are some suggestions for more acceptable and/or better ways to evaluate how someone thinks on their feet? I remember hearing that Google's done quite a bit of research on hiring practices vs outcomes, and that one of the leading predictors is having external groups do the interviewing, i.e., making sure the people doing the interviewing have no stake in the outcome.
- parsnips 8y ago
  My hypothesis (of what people want in an interview): Interviewer to engage in conversation with applicant about applicant's prior work in detail. If the applicant can give sufficient explanations of systems/projects and the interviewer can ask appropriate probing questions and get sufficient responses to those questions from the applicant.. then the interview can be concluded positively. The crux of it, from the applicant point of view, is that they want to be believed and treated "professionally". Further it's "insulting" to be questioned about anything other than specific experiences. That's why you see objections to every sort of "objective" line of interview: sample projects - too much time, why am I coding for you for free? github/open source - I have hobbies outside of programming white boarding/google doc coding - not my environment for writing code. I need emacs with xyz keybindings or we're not going to make progress. algorithm problems solving - the job doesn't entail re-implementing hash tables, or sorting algorithms... The question(s) are not germane to the position etc etc etc
  - dahart 8y ago
    > they want to be believed and treated "professionally". Further it's "insulting" to be questioned about anything other than specific experiences. Yeah, I agree; I have the same hypothesis that this is what people want. And it's a problem to assume and/or act like talking about anything other than specific coding experience is in any way insulting. That's not exactly a realistic expectation, nor is it a great attitude for getting hired. Personality, behavior, poise, attitude and communication skills are absolutely relevant to someone's ability to do their job on a team. If you can't think on your feet or answer a question without a computer in front of you, and you start getting angry, how will you behave in meetings? That behavior is precisely one of things I look for when I ask candidates to think on their feet. If someone assumes that being asked certain questions is "unprofessional", then that's a red flag and I'll be more careful before hiring someone like that. Now that I think about it, there's a bit of irony that if someone performs poorly on these kinds of questions, I'm likely to spend more time investigating that and asking more questions along those lines.
gldev3 8y ago
What i want the most is being able to put these companies to test, i have 0 problems with whiteboard problems but like evaluating them, are they all compotent or is it the company a one trick pony with only a few decent engineers.
danielbarla 8y ago
Is whiteboard interviewing so bad that people would go out of their way to avoid it? I mean, I've encountered / can imagine horror stories for all the usual alternatives: a) take this 3-day long mini-project, do it using all of our preferred technologies (some of which you'll be using for the first time) and get it back to us - it should only take you 4 hours! Or b) do this on site, using our machines and environments which will be unfamiliar to you. Or c) speak to some random invigilator over Skype. Or d) do a written test, or e) take us through your GitHub collection, which may or may not exist, etc. My preferred way of testing people was usually to try to get them to show me that they have thought about why they develop software in the fashion that they do. I would prefer to do this in person, at a very high level, but it often ended up being a written test (where necessary, the language was your choice, or pseudocode). Is this wrong?
- twblalock 8y ago
  > Is whiteboard interviewing so bad that people would go out of their way to avoid it? I mean, I've encountered / can imagine horror stories for all the usual alternatives: a) take this 3-day long mini-project, do it using all of our preferred technologies (some of which you'll be using for the first time) and get it back to us - it should only take you 4 hours! Or b) do this on site, using our machines and environments which will be unfamiliar to you. Or c) speak to some random invigilator over Skype. Or d) do a written test, or e) take us through your GitHub collection, which may or may not exist, etc. This is the problem. There was recently a large HN thread about the take-home projects and how so many people didn't like them. None of the options are popular: if you use whiteboarding, people will complain it's a bunch of brain teasers unrelated to real programming work. If you use take-home projects, people will complain about doing unpaid work. Would professional certifications help? I doubt it -- they would need to be based on standardized tests, which would have the same drawbacks as the whiteboarding questions nobody likes.
  - danielbarla 8y ago
    To give an alternative approach - I found that in general, I could get a pretty good idea about a candidate using either the verbal interaction or written test. The idea was to give questions which are almost a polar opposite of the strange trivia style questions you see in certification exams. Instead of the candidate having to remember which overload of an API returns a byte[], we'd instead talk about things like how they prefer to structure a project, and how this feeds into maintainability, etc. If the person was into object orientation, we'd talk about that, if they were into a more functional style, same angle, but I want them to have thought about it from a software engineering side. It sounds wishy-washy, but with just a few pointed questions, you can detect both BS answers, as well as someone who hasn't really thought about it. I tend to find that this quality in an individual is a very important predictor of performance, as it indicates deep care and interest about their craft. With good candidates, you can get really deep into a discussion and know within 5 minutes that they are quality. Along the way, you'd also get a pretty good picture of the persons strengths and stylistic preferences, which you can use to determine how and where they would fit in with the team(s) you had in mind. The only downsides are that I wasn't always available for these interviews, and the written equivalent intimidating and could take long. Also, various people swore that they either can't perform well in written or verbal conditions, so perhaps letting the candidate choose between the two might be beneficial.
keeptrying 8y ago
Best job board marketing I've seen in a while.
donretag 8y ago
I do not mind whiteboarding at all. I have three whiteboards at home for brainstorming. I draw the line at doing take home tests. I cannot interview a company if I am doing a take home assignment. With whiteboarding, I get to also assess my potential co-workers abilities by seeing if they are asking interesting questions.
api 8y ago
I've been programming since BASIC on a VIC-20 sometime around age 6. I can code in like 10 languages and have written everything from crypto and network protocols to distributed systems, database sync engines, and high throughput video compression/decompression codecs. I always fail whiteboard interviews. I can't code at all on a whiteboard.
- nathanaldensr 8y ago
  You're the false negative that nearly every software company seems intent on avoiding at all costs... ...and probably a better software developer than 99% of the people they end up hiring.
  - api 8y ago
    I ended up starting my own so meh. https://zerotier.com/ https://zerotier.com/
pagbot 8y ago
Cool. A website full of companies to avoid. Thanks for posting!
jasonrhaas 8y ago
Wow, there are so many new ways that people are coming up with to recruit software developers. Clearly there is a problem here that needs to be solved. I understand that the company needs a way to vet people to make sure they are technically proficient for the job. However, there must be a better way of filtering people. I just bailed on a company after they told me what the interview process would be: - Take home coding quiz where you need to sign up and use their algorithm platform. As you would expect, there was asynchronous programming and a recursion algorithm involved (two for one!) - 3 more technical interviews. 2 of which were screen share and/or white boarding sessions. 1 is a "riddle part", which I assume is some kind of brain teaser involving a recursive algorithm. After I saw the coding quiz and all the follow on stuff I just told them I wasn't interested. I was kind of offended, and it didn't put me in a positive mindset towards the company and engineers that worked there.
- scruple 8y ago
  It all amounts to little more than our industries hazing rituals.
  - nathanaldensr 8y ago
    This is what I tell people all the time. That one word sums up nearly every dysfunctional interviewing and filtering process. Hazing. It's just monkeys making sure they only hire other similar-looking and similarly-acting monkeys.
djhworld 8y ago
At my work one part of the interview is a System Design test, where the candidate is presented with a problem and we ask them to come up with a system (i.e. by gathering requirements etc) Usually this means drawing stuff on the whiteboard with boxes and arrows. Not looking for the perfect system or 'correct' solution, just really having a look at what the candidate is experienced in and how they think. Whiteboards are fine for that use case, and can be very expressive. Doing binary search trees and stuff though doesn't seem as useful really.
hellofunk 8y ago
I think whiteboards are much better than the remote code-as-we-watch stuff, which is even more common and not a good way to measure actual work skills.
Shank 8y ago
I really like the idea of this, but how many jobs posted here are for senior or high experience positions? The whiteboard filter can still happen at any of these companies in junior developer ranks. This just creates elitism where the "senior" developers get nice hiring processes, and the junior developers get stuck with traditional torture.
- taurath 8y ago
  I think its still valid if someone doesn't have a good-size body of work, however the more CS heavy it is and unrelated to the actual work the more you're optimizing for "did this person recently graduate with a CS degree".
slackoverflower 8y ago
FYI All your subscriber's emails are accessible at https://whiteboardfree.com/email_subscribers.json https://whiteboardfree.com/email_subscribers.json since you didn't put any authentication on those endpoints. It's a basic Rails app so I'm guessing other users may got a hold of the list already.
- swyx 8y ago
  I guess their Privacy Policy checks out https://whiteboardfree.com/privacy https://whiteboardfree.com/privacy
  - yeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
    belly laughs
- danpalmer 8y ago
  So you're telling me that someone who created a site to post job adverts for jobs that don't test programming skills, has managed to write a security vulnerability into the site? Never! I don't agree with making candidates write algorithms they don't need to know in a format that they don't need to be able to write them, but I am in favour of testing candidates thoroughly.
- CameronBanga 8y ago
  This is a pretty crummy wait to disclose a security vulnerability. Yeah, this one is pretty bad. But let’s try to do better, not worse.
tal_berzniz 8y ago
A lot of the important tech decision take place around a whiteboard where people communicate their ideas. Whiteboard questions are okay. Only giving tasks is not how a real workplace work
notadoc 8y ago
If you're interested in someones coding prowess and process, review something they have written with them. It's far more effective than commanding some nervous candidate to get in front of a group of people and start writing code on a wall.
akyu 8y ago
Whiteboarding is fine when done well, horrible when done poorly. The variance is on the side of the interviewers. I've done a lot of interviews over the years, and I've encountered a couple stereotypes: 1. The gotcha interviewers. He pulled out his old algorithm text book and found the hardest problem. 2. The no bullshit interviewer. Asks you to code a somewhat challenging, but solvable problem. No tricks. Basically non-trival fizz buzz problems. The problem with these is there are only so many practical problems you can give before it gets put up on leetcode, and every interviewee has memorized the code. 3. The clueless interviewer. They try to give you a weird mix of an IQ test and a personality test, and maybe throw in a little bit of API trivia while they are at it.
kuon 8y ago
I've been coding for 25 years and I wrote some complicated piece of software, but I would be incapable to write code on a whiteboard.
smnplk 8y ago
Call me racist, but I also don't like blackboards.
EgoIncarnate 8y ago
Maybe Lyft varies it's interviews, but: 1) https://whiteboardfree.com/job_posts/52 https://whiteboardfree.com/job_posts/52 - Lyft - Data Engineering 2) https://eng.lyft.com/interviewing-tips-for-android-engineers-f01ce7fba163 https://eng.lyft.com/interviewing-tips-for-android-engineers... - "Expect a few coding questions either on a whiteboard " ( Dec 21, 2017 ) Pretty sure Netflix (also has a job listed) does whiteboard based evaluation too.
edem 8y ago
So is this supposed to be a good or a bad thing? I've used whiteboards in a lot of interviews to great effect. I wouldn't confuse whiteboards with riddles. I also hate riddles and puzzles because they check for the riddle-solving skill, not the actual skill which will be used at work. Whiteboards are a completely orthogonal topic to riddles.
lscore720 8y ago
Some companies effectivdely use whiteboarding, others don't. This is a true snapshot of the absurd sense of entitlement among some tech workers these days. When the bubble eventually pops, people will look back at this website promotion with awe. It's like challenging the generally accepted standard that interviewees dress up a bit more formally than a typical day at the office (i.e. button down versus old T-shirt).

396 points by vbordo 8y ago

exelius 8y ago

Don’t whiteboard during interviews? Or don’t whiteboard at all? Dropping the former is good, the latter is bad...

deleted 8y ago
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sanxiyn 8y ago

Whiteboard rhymes with waterboard.

nickthemagicman 8y ago
ish
- unit91 8y ago
  Makes me wonder where he's from. Maybe with a South African accent or similar. They sound very different with my Ohio accent though.

ddtaylor 8y ago

I was just speaking with a co-worker about how I consider this interview culture to be a race to the bottom in how much unpaid work companies are getting from prospective employees. When I interviewed with Facebook they do back to back whiteboard interviews for about 6+ hours then sometimes they give "homework" problems, etc. Even skilled candidates can't refuse because a less skilled candidate will come along willing to make the sacrifice. I don't have any solutions only complaints and bitterness, sorry.

bgribble 8y ago
At my startup we pay interviewees a decent hourly consulting rate for take-home problems or full-day followup onsites (after the first interview). We only do them when we are pretty excited about a candidate but need more information to make a hiring decision. It's cheap, really, considering the cost of sourcing candidates and the cost of making a bad hiring decision.
- rrdharan 8y ago
  Interesting and the first I’ve heard of this and the first confirmation I’ve heard that cost-wise it’s not egregious to do so. It still seems strange to me to pay for throwaway work but I can also see how that’s really just my personal sentiment / bias and this is probably a pretty good and balanced approach.
  - pc86 8y ago
    Except some of us already have full-time jobs and don't want to spend the weekend working on quizzes, whether it's paid or not. And unless you're very generous with timing taking a day off of work can be a logistical issue, not just a pay issue. This type of interview self-selects for people with fewer family/non-work obligations, who are willing and able to spend their free time still programming.
    - pault 8y ago
      Sometimes you might have to inconvenience yourself to improve your career.
      - Clubber 8y ago
        Ya, if you paid double market rates, I'd do it. I suspect most people who do this sort of thing probably pay market or worse.
    - dfee 8y ago
      Cost of doing business. Not willing to put in your free time? No need to worry about getting a new job. Are you also job hunting at work, doing interviews on your employers time, etc?

danpalmer 8y ago

Might be worth clarifying whether this is “don’t use a whiteboard during interviews” or “don’t ask candidates to code obscure algorithms” on a whiteboard. We use a whiteboard in our interviews for sketching UI, and sometimes drawing a database table. Generally candidates find this much easier than talking through their design, and we think that interview very closely represents what we do on a day to day basis.

gtaylor 8y ago
I really like them for Infrastructure or systems diagrams, too!
- mikepurvis 8y ago
  Yeah, that's key. "Explain how your piece fit into the bigger picture— what other things does it talk to, how tightly are they coupled, how are errors propagated, etc."
jakelazaroff 8y ago
There was a good article that popped up on here a couple months ago about this: "Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry". [1] If you're asking candidates to balance a binary search tree when no one in the history of your company has ever had to do that, you're asking the wrong questions. [1] http://prog21.dadgum.com/177.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/177.html
- danpalmer 8y ago
  Yep. Which is why we don’t. We do a mock technical meeting with multiple members of our tech team and the candidate presenting options, talking through pros and cons, etc. Much of the interview is about assessing communication rather than technical skills. The interview is basically a standard tech meeting that we hold regularly in the team to discuss designs of new projects.
  - jakelazaroff 8y ago

yanslookup 8y ago

I recently had an onsite tech screen at a FANG company that requires whiteboard programming. The problem itself wasn't hard but I missed a requirement that was actually a hint. I shutdown and couldn't move on or work through it. That said, I don't think whiteboard programming is always bad but it is a skill that I don't exercise and it showed. My advice, talk through the problem with the interviewer and don't start writing code on the whiteboard until the interviewer has ok'd your proposed solution.

dominotw 8y ago
I usually need like good 5-10 minutes of quite time to think about the problem in peace. I just can't seem to do with interviewer staring at me and hounding me to 'think out loud', sorry I can't talk and think at the same time. I have no practise at 'thinking out loud' , i never do it in real life.
- Double_a_92 8y ago
  Yeah this would maybe only work for simple problems, that one can solve without thinking too far.
- bradlys 8y ago
  And that's why you have to practice. I was the same but I do a lot better now after having done some 200+ technical interviews and a lot of practice on my own.
  - Clubber 8y ago
    200 technical interviews?! What the hell? You shouldn't have to do 200 in your lifetime. This kinda reminds me of those MCSE certification bootcamps they used to have. They didn't teach you anything useful, they just taught you how to hack the test.

vinayms 8y ago

Comment: I think whiteboards get unnecessary flak when the real culprits are games and riddles. I would argue that using a whiteboard to convey ideas is a fundamental skill if one has to work in a creative team. Question: How do you validate that the posted company or job position doesn't need whiteboard? Is it after the fact, as in a disgruntled candidate complaining? I couldn't find any information about this on the site.

clarry 8y ago
> I would argue that using a whiteboard to convey ideas is a fundamental skill if one has to work in a creative team. Yet a lot of people are never really taught to do it. Perhaps they pick up this fundamental skill just fine after a couple whiteboarding sessions in the company. If a company is rejecting candidates for not having a skill that is really easy and quick to obtain, they'd better not be one of these companies that keep complaining about shortage of talent.

nickthemagicman 8y ago

I never realized whiteboarding was an issue. I wish someone would would make one of these sites for open office free jobs.(not the softare)

fasouto 8y ago
+1 to this. Even better, I would love a site that classifies job offers/companies by: - Has an onboarding process for new hires - Has quiet working conditions / open office - Has clear requirements - Salary range - Allows remote working - Type of interview and time to get a response
tom_mellior 8y ago
StackOverflow's job board has the "Joel Test" part where employers posting jobs can check off the points from https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s... that they fulfill. One of them is "quiet working conditions", which comes close. Before looking it up just now, I could have sworn the point was something like "every developer has a door they can close", but oh well. Anyway, I hoped you could search only for jobs where this box was checked by the company, but apparently not... EDIT: It does allow searching for minimal salary and remote jobs, among the wishes listed in a sibling comment.
- Clubber 8y ago
  Wow that would really turn the tables; a job board where companies must not only disclose their interviewing practices and durations but their office environment as well. It would be developer centric so developers can pick and choose the companies they want to work for based on often hidden parameters. Just the transparency requirements would automatically filter out most the chaff companies. I might have to build that out of spite. :)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- 8y ago

heckanoobs 8y ago

I still whiteboard my programming question when giving interviews, can someone summarize the case against whiteboards? I'm just looking for the candidate's thought process and some pseudocode. I could do the same thing in an empty text file but the substance of the interview wouldn't change. My feeling right now is that being anti whiteboard is focusing on trivialities like complaining that the office style guide uses Allman vs K&R bracketing or something. But I'm open to having my mind changed if there's something more to it.

bgribble 8y ago
I like to use whiteboards for non-coding design questions, like talking through how you would architect an app, drawing DB schema diagrams, etc. It's a tool that we use for collaborating on things like this in the office, so demonstrating an ability to do it is meaningful. Actually hand-writing code with a pen has always seemed weird to me. As a programmer, I compose code with a keyboard. So I give candidates a laptop and use an interactive screensharing tool (I like https://codepad.remoteinterview.io https://codepad.remoteinterview.io) where they can run code in the language of their choice in a browser, and I can watch and talk through the process.
sidlls 8y ago
Being anti-whiteboard is a proxy for being against the "regurgitate this CS trivia on a board in front of me" style of interview, not against the use of a whiteboard. Most problems in practice that require non-trivial application of algorithms, dynamic programming and the like have two characteristics that make them differ considerably from whiteboard style quizzes. For one, they're going to be much less contrived (pick a random leetcode question for an example of this, odds are it's contrived). Secondly, they're going to be resolved when developers talk to each other about them and there is recognition of the solution, which most of the time is an application of algorithms and data structures with library implementations. The ability to whiteboard things like "given an array of integers and a target find the indices of the pair of integers in the array that sum to the target" and "find the first missing positive integer in an unsorted array in O(n) time and O(1) space" provides almost no useful information about a candidate's ability to solve an actual problem the company faces in most instances. There are exceptions, but interviewing everyone for the standard of that one exception is asinine.

donttrack 8y ago

I was “surprise whiteboarded” recently. It was my first whiteboard interview and I actually thought it was an interesting experience.

deleted 8y ago

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JTbane 8y ago

Whiteboards are not the problem- rather the questions that candidates are asked are bad. Asking someone to solve an obscure mathematical problem (the Two Egg problem seems to be in fashion) doesn't do much except test whether the candidate has memorized the answer.

ybrah 8y ago
Whiteboard problems are used to show that you can work through a problem, while communicating well about your thought process. They're also good general intelligence tests, if administered correctly.
- sidlls 8y ago
  That they're used for those things doesn't mean they work. They're especially not good general intelligence tests.
  - ybrah 8y ago
    I'd wager that the fact that many high power companies use whiteboards for interviews point to the fact that they're useful.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      The fact that there are so many successful fast food chains points to the fact that the food is good and healthy.
    - sixstringtheory 8y ago
      This is appealing to authority/popularity. But since we’ve gone there, many high power companies also have a lot of chuckleheads running around.
    - aianus 8y ago
      Maybe they're only useful when you're a high power company with $200k+ total comp and more applicants than you know what to do with.

j7ake 8y ago

Using a whiteboard to give a talk about your project is desirable in my opinion , you might need to be more specific with what is whiteboard free.

zerr 8y ago

What about CS-riddles/competitive programming free companies? Who only ask relevant to the job questions during interviews.

dash_shi 8y ago

Lyft doesn't do whiteboard when hiring engineers?

denvercoder904 8y ago
That's the first thing I noticed about the list. I interviewed with Lyft last year and they did whiteboard style interviews. Since when did this change?
- jhall1468 8y ago
  It didnt. I'd guess they are just pulling in a ton of jobs so they look popular enough to justify the fee to post a job there

ryanong 8y ago

At plated we do two coding interviews. The first is concrete, we have a library that is poorly written and their job is to implement a new feature and refactor it. This is a great interview to understand core skills. The second interview is a modeling exercise where we build an app from scratch with escalating amount of complexity but only asking for what the database and api endpoints would look like.

maxxxxx 8y ago
This seems pretty reasonable to me.

iothetiger 8y ago

This is great. I suspect the "coding exercises" in interviews are really dominance hierarchy games. It goes against politeness theory and is a threat to an individual's 'negative face' or need for autonomy.

runlevel1 8y ago

Do people hate whiteboarding in general or the questions they're being asked to draw? I can fully understand dislike for puzzles and being asked to implement irrelevant algorithms in pseudo code. The interview should reflect the job being interviewed for. I've found whiteboarding to be mutually helpful in questions about system architecture. Plus, it's something that we actually do on-the-job.

Clubber 8y ago
Yes, but you don't write what you expect to be fully functional code on a whiteboard. A whiteboard is good for sharing ideas. Using it to write and assess code is pretty stupid if you step back and think about it. I mean ask yourself this: do you ever use the whiteboard to write code to the extent you expect some poor kid trying to get his first job to do? Hell no, you screen share an IDE or paste code in an email. People used to have to write code on paper (I did this a few times in college ages ago) and that comes from the cost of compiling stuff way back when. Computing time is friggin cheap, that's why no one does it. To expect some new guy to be adept at that ancient practice is silly.
- runlevel1 8y ago
  I agree. This is a form of the psychological concept of encoding specificity principle[1] which states that recall is most effective when the conditions at the time of encoding match the conditions at the time of retrieval. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encoding_specificity_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encoding_specificity_principle
pjmlp 8y ago
For example, what does the ability to reverse an AVL tree on the whiteboard have to do with doing UI design in XAML?
- doorbumper 8y ago
  UI Design or a Frontend Software Engineer? I'd expect people working on the frontend to just as proficient in time complexity, space complexity, and performance analysis as a backend engineer. I don't particularly gravitate towards companies working in CRUD apps, but single page applications with complex UI flows and data collection can certainly need those abilities. For one, it's not particularly uncommon to have an actual tree in the UI. How would you represent that tree? How are you going to handle it as it grows to thousands of nodes? I think few frontend developers would consider the work they do to be "UI design".

crsv 8y ago

We don't whiteboard at my company, as we favor a take home technical exercise and debrief/walkthrough format for interviewing our engineers. That being said, I'm super turned off by the incessant whining from the community about various interviewing practices. Here's the tough truth I think: Some companies simply do not understand how to properly engage in employee selection. They get some quick guidance from a google search and have too much autonomy in the process to make their own decisions because the company hasn't really empowered their talent processes to be well thought out and planned. This happens frequently. The real shame in it all it that it focuses the conversation on these high level exercises - be it coding on a white board or rallying against take home exercises or demanding to be paid for interview work, and ultimately to the employer you're put in a spot where you can't help but feel a little reactionary as the transactionality of the relationship is constant: I need to know you can do the work, prove to me you can, I will then hire you and pay you to work. What a cluster it's all becoming on the software engineering side.

jjaredsimpson 8y ago
I have an interview coming up and the process as described to me is take home exercise with an on site debrief. I am thrilled. I've done whiteboard interviews and some I've aced and some I've crashed an burned. I didn't crash and burn because I didn't know the material. I just froze on a tree traversal question one time. And then the nerves and empty conversation just made the situation snowball as I thought to myself, "OMG I know this why am I taking so long, what is this guy thinking right now." I relish the opportunity to provide useful information for the employer to update their prior.
Clubber 8y ago
>I'm super turned off by the incessant whining from the community about various interviewing practices. Wow, what an incredibly tone deaf response. >Some companies simply do not understand how to properly engage in employee selection. Maybe changing this prospective is the point of the "incessant whining." >I need to know you can do the work, prove to me you can, I will then hire you and pay you to work. I'd have to know how you are testing, but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts your method has no way of predicting output in any meaningful way. >What a cluster it's all becoming on the software engineering side. Absolutely. I would say it's endangering the overall quality of the industry. The saying goes, if you are a bad manager or a bad company the first people to leave are the A and B players. The people that will never leave are the C and D players. I suspect people who do all this trivia don't even know what an A or B player looks like.

gayfakenews 8y ago

too many programmers cant program and hurt their fee-fees so a company was made to accept fucking 300$ per ad. Anyone who cant whiteboard or pseudo is fucking retarded.

kazinator 8y ago

How about "night-mode.com": developer jobs at old-school companies that interview with a blackboard and chalk.

ybrah 8y ago

Whiteboard problems work great as a general intelligence test if administered correctly. A well designed whiteboard problem will filter out people of lesser intelligence. This means the people you would be working with would generally be more intelligent. This is not a bad thing. Furthermore, whiteboards are great communication tools. I spend some time on VRChat's whiteboard room teaching people various algorithms, and other abstract things to help me learn. Someone who knows how to use a whiteboard and communicate correctly would be a better hire than someone who doesn't. If the company you work at uses whiteboard problems to vet interviewees, just drill them. With a little practice, you'll have a better chance.

nunya213 8y ago
This is so wrong that it actually hurts my brain. Albert Einstein, a certifiable genius probably could not tell you how to invert a binary tree, this has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with how many HackerRank problems you have memorized.
- recursive 8y ago
  There are many things you can do with a whiteboard other than inverting binary trees. You're thinking too narrowly.
  - nunya213 8y ago
    Obviously, but I was specifically referring to the typical algorithm oriented whiteboard questions found at major tech company interviews. Working a real world problem on a whiteboard I see no issue with.
    - recursive 8y ago
      This whole post is about companies that "don't whiteboard". Not companies that "only whiteboard for real world problems".
- Melchizedek 8y ago

stephenr 8y ago

Up next: elevator music free jobs. Dev jobs at Companies without that predictable elevator music. Maybe I’m missing the point though.

jhall1468 8y ago
The point is "post a job for $xxx". This shit has gotten popular after the success of weworkremotely

rbosinger 8y ago

I had to write a JavaScript program on graph paper (with no computer on hand) as a college test. Then the professor would type them out afterwards with you and try to run it. Whenever I hear about this whiteboarding issue I think of that. It was actually kind of fun in a weird way though. I drew nice curly braces.

spraak 8y ago
> I drew nice curly braces. Heh, I code pretty often on paper when I'm working through a design and my style has evolved to just using < and > as proxies for curly braces which saves me time, since trying to draw a nice curly brace takes me so long.

_bxg1 8y ago

...do people really hate whiteboard interviews enough for a website like this to make money?

strken 8y ago
Some proportion of perfectly good engineers couldn't pass a whiteboard interview to save their lives, for much the same reason I couldn't pass a job interview that measured communication skills by karaoke performance and emoji literacy.
- _bxg1 8y ago
  The company needs to evaluate your problem-solving skills though. I mean, I'll admit that writing code on a literal whiteboard is more physically arduous than on a keyboard or even a piece of paper, but if the root issue is live coding challenges themselves, I don't see a way around it. Some companies look at your GitHub profile instead, which imo is much more unfair, because it presumes you've had the free time and the desire to work on side projects, which shouldn't be a requirement for a job. Maybe companies should adopt an either-or policy? Give the interviewer the option to demonstrate their skills in the form that works best for them.

d--b 8y ago

So all of these ask for a 2-week home project?

pulkitsh1234 8y ago

Free alternative: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

hnrodey 8y ago

Am I the only one who thought this post title meant jobs at companies that simply don't use whiteboards in the day-to-day aspect of working?

blauditore 8y ago

What would be a good selection strategy without technical interviews? I've seen people with good CV and reference projects being hired, only to turn out they literally couldn't program. It's old news that sneaking to a CS degree without learning anything substantial is possible, and those are easily debunked in even simple task like solving FizzBuzz on the whiteboard.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago
No whiteboard doesn't mean no technical interview. You can pair up on a real computer, you can have a take home, things like that.
- blauditore 8y ago
  Both of these have huge disadvantages for interviewing: - When working in front of a computer, people get worse at communicating. Even if they try to speak out their thougts, it usually doesn't work well, as thinking and operating an IDE (or whatever at hand) already occupies a lot of brain capacity. - Take-home exercises are hard to control: You don't know how long a candidate worked on it. Even if there's a target like 4 hours, some might work all night on it - either because they couldn't do it in the allocated time, or because they fear some disadvantage. Apart of that, they might pay someone to solve it for them.
  - actionowl 8y ago
    > Apart of that, they might pay someone to solve it for them. I think that can be solved by having the candidate talk about their solution and how they made certain choices.
stronglikedan 8y ago
I love FizzBuzz and am constantly astonished on the amount of candidates it weeds out in the first in-person interview.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

I don't mind whiteboarding. I do mind questions that are puzzles or algorithmic in a way that does not directly reflect the company's current software. I usually (ok, almost always) flesh out designs and pseudocode with pencil and paper anyway, so changing to use a whiteboard isn't an issue. Standing in front of a handful of strangers glaring at me while I try and figure out some stupid algorithm they had to Google themselves is hazing and should be stopped. Edit: Also, dinging me for small syntax issues on a whiteboard when I'm used to using an IDE is not really cool.

lasereyes136 8y ago

This all remains me of a quote I have recently seen: "Most Programmer wouldn't hire themselves" As long as we keep asking people to do things that aren't like the work that we do, we will continue to get mismatches and people that interview well but work poorly. I don't have a great solution, finding good people is hard.

brokenwren 8y ago

I've been using whiteboards for 2 decades during the interview process and they work great, if you ask the right questions. I've built great engineering teams at companies like Orbtiz and whiteboards were one of our best tools. The reason they are important is that they are part of every engineers day-to-day work. We use them to collaborate and design and understand. Therefore, if a candidate can't whiteboard a design, solution, architecture, etc. in a manner that other engineers can understand it, they are going to struggle. That being said, the way Google and other companies use whiteboards is an epic fail. Asking someone to code on a whiteboard is stupid. Asking them to solve algorithm puzzlers on a whiteboard is lame. This isn't how we use whiteboards every day so why should a candidate be expected to use them this way during an interview.

andrewstuart2 8y ago
I've legitimately used whiteboards to pseudocode while discussing architecture with teammates plenty of times before. Does it compile? No. But the point is that I can more easily demonstrate the benefits of an approach with some concrete pseudocode to help grok the proposed algorithm. As an aside, if you've never done systems design or pseudocode on a Smartboard, you're really missing out. Copy/paste, duplicating a slide, recalling earlier slides, etc. Man, that's the way to design a system with quick iteration but still no worry of losing your work.
- Jemmeh 8y ago
  Yes but I think the point is a lot of interviewers do not go for pseudocode. They want syntax perfect solutions on a whiteboard.
  - ianhawes 8y ago
    This. When interviewers feel that the question was not hard enough or that they didn't like the answer, they often fall back on "you're missing a semicolon".
  - brokenwren 8y ago
    Yes. That's essentially what I was getting at. Asking someone to code accurately on a whiteboard is nonsense. When I interviewed at Google, they asked me if my whiteboard code would compile. I said, "give me a laptop and I'll tell you". I don't think they liked that answer. ;)

ivanhoe 8y ago

It would be very useful to be able to filter just the remote positions. Searching for "remote" as a location returns no results, and I can see in the list that some remote positions are being offered.

stefanve 8y ago

My personal experience in hiring is that people should be able to explain concepts in a clear why. So usually I ask to explain an pattern that they say they have experience in. I let him/her choose how they want to explain it whiteboard / pen and paper / words only, sitting or standing. I don't care as long as the person is good in explaining and has a firm grasp of the subject. Both are needed to do a proper job. There are lots of people that are unable to explain MVC in a clear let alone correctly even if they used .NET MVC or spring MVC (or whatever)for 10+ years. After that is seldom useful to ask anything else.. this approach had never failed me.

diabeetusman 8y ago

The Terms of Service page is blank (https://whiteboardfree.com/terms https://whiteboardfree.com/terms)

alpb 8y ago

Aside: With about 40 job postings, each at 300$/month, they're probably making $144k with little to no operational or infrastructure costs. They should be on https://www.indiehackers.com/products https://www.indiehackers.com/products.

curtis 8y ago

I'd much rather code on a whiteboard than do a take-home assignment. I may be in the minority but I rather suspect I'm not the only one. I can understand that some people find whiteboard coding really stressful. I never have, and I have found take-home assignments to be a huge time-sink which typically results in minimal feedback (and sometimes none at all). Maybe the right thing to do is to just give interviewees a choice.

weeksie 8y ago

You know, when I'm interviewing someone my VASTLY preferred approach is to have them walk me through something they've coded that they're proud of. That's not aways possible, but often it is. Give me a good slow walk through your github repo and tell me where and why you made the choices you did, what the tradeoffs were, etc. . . Better than making some poor bastard jump through hoops on problems that only vaguely resemble the ones they'll be solving at work.

mongol 8y ago
Yes this is the best method I have found. Let them explain something they have worked on that provides them with experience they believe qualifies them for the position. Here I can surely expect them to have depth, assess their communication skills, be able to explain further on questions from me etc.

justin66 8y ago

I interviewed once at a place where a friend worked as an engineer. She assured me that they didn't do whiteboard questions. Guess what I had to contend with during two different interviews...

innagadadavida 8y ago

There is a Netflix and Lyft post, but going by past experiences there are whiteboard coding problems. Are these companies spamming it? How do they police these possibly fake posts? After all, the thing recruiters care most is how many people apply.

bhuga 8y ago

This is a good idea, although the focus on 'anti-whiteboard' is a bit limiting. It's a shame it's its own site instead of a feature on other sites. There's no interview process that works best for every candidate; some prefer whiteboards or homework or practical debugging on their on computer or hand-wavey design or whatever. Candidates (and companies!) could save a lot of time by letting applicants filter their searches to companies using methods that will let them put their best foot forward.

dahart 8y ago

I'd love to hear alternatives, rather than a list of who doesn't. I don't use whiteboards for coding tests, I use whiteboards as one (of several) ways to evaluate how someone thinks on their feet without having Stack Overflow & Google at their fingertips. I don't only want to know if someone can code, I want to know about their process, how they think about things, what assumptions they start with, and what kinds of things they like to explore. I want to see some personality. Take home problems don't measure that very well, nor do coding tests with online resources available. I've never met a perfect interview, but what are some suggestions for more acceptable and/or better ways to evaluate how someone thinks on their feet? I remember hearing that Google's done quite a bit of research on hiring practices vs outcomes, and that one of the leading predictors is having external groups do the interviewing, i.e., making sure the people doing the interviewing have no stake in the outcome.

parsnips 8y ago
My hypothesis (of what people want in an interview): Interviewer to engage in conversation with applicant about applicant's prior work in detail. If the applicant can give sufficient explanations of systems/projects and the interviewer can ask appropriate probing questions and get sufficient responses to those questions from the applicant.. then the interview can be concluded positively. The crux of it, from the applicant point of view, is that they want to be believed and treated "professionally". Further it's "insulting" to be questioned about anything other than specific experiences. That's why you see objections to every sort of "objective" line of interview: sample projects - too much time, why am I coding for you for free? github/open source - I have hobbies outside of programming white boarding/google doc coding - not my environment for writing code. I need emacs with xyz keybindings or we're not going to make progress. algorithm problems solving - the job doesn't entail re-implementing hash tables, or sorting algorithms... The question(s) are not germane to the position etc etc etc
- dahart 8y ago
  > they want to be believed and treated "professionally". Further it's "insulting" to be questioned about anything other than specific experiences. Yeah, I agree; I have the same hypothesis that this is what people want. And it's a problem to assume and/or act like talking about anything other than specific coding experience is in any way insulting. That's not exactly a realistic expectation, nor is it a great attitude for getting hired. Personality, behavior, poise, attitude and communication skills are absolutely relevant to someone's ability to do their job on a team. If you can't think on your feet or answer a question without a computer in front of you, and you start getting angry, how will you behave in meetings? That behavior is precisely one of things I look for when I ask candidates to think on their feet. If someone assumes that being asked certain questions is "unprofessional", then that's a red flag and I'll be more careful before hiring someone like that. Now that I think about it, there's a bit of irony that if someone performs poorly on these kinds of questions, I'm likely to spend more time investigating that and asking more questions along those lines.

gldev3 8y ago

What i want the most is being able to put these companies to test, i have 0 problems with whiteboard problems but like evaluating them, are they all compotent or is it the company a one trick pony with only a few decent engineers.

danielbarla 8y ago

Is whiteboard interviewing so bad that people would go out of their way to avoid it? I mean, I've encountered / can imagine horror stories for all the usual alternatives: a) take this 3-day long mini-project, do it using all of our preferred technologies (some of which you'll be using for the first time) and get it back to us - it should only take you 4 hours! Or b) do this on site, using our machines and environments which will be unfamiliar to you. Or c) speak to some random invigilator over Skype. Or d) do a written test, or e) take us through your GitHub collection, which may or may not exist, etc. My preferred way of testing people was usually to try to get them to show me that they have thought about why they develop software in the fashion that they do. I would prefer to do this in person, at a very high level, but it often ended up being a written test (where necessary, the language was your choice, or pseudocode). Is this wrong?

twblalock 8y ago
> Is whiteboard interviewing so bad that people would go out of their way to avoid it? I mean, I've encountered / can imagine horror stories for all the usual alternatives: a) take this 3-day long mini-project, do it using all of our preferred technologies (some of which you'll be using for the first time) and get it back to us - it should only take you 4 hours! Or b) do this on site, using our machines and environments which will be unfamiliar to you. Or c) speak to some random invigilator over Skype. Or d) do a written test, or e) take us through your GitHub collection, which may or may not exist, etc. This is the problem. There was recently a large HN thread about the take-home projects and how so many people didn't like them. None of the options are popular: if you use whiteboarding, people will complain it's a bunch of brain teasers unrelated to real programming work. If you use take-home projects, people will complain about doing unpaid work. Would professional certifications help? I doubt it -- they would need to be based on standardized tests, which would have the same drawbacks as the whiteboarding questions nobody likes.
- danielbarla 8y ago
  To give an alternative approach - I found that in general, I could get a pretty good idea about a candidate using either the verbal interaction or written test. The idea was to give questions which are almost a polar opposite of the strange trivia style questions you see in certification exams. Instead of the candidate having to remember which overload of an API returns a byte[], we'd instead talk about things like how they prefer to structure a project, and how this feeds into maintainability, etc. If the person was into object orientation, we'd talk about that, if they were into a more functional style, same angle, but I want them to have thought about it from a software engineering side. It sounds wishy-washy, but with just a few pointed questions, you can detect both BS answers, as well as someone who hasn't really thought about it. I tend to find that this quality in an individual is a very important predictor of performance, as it indicates deep care and interest about their craft. With good candidates, you can get really deep into a discussion and know within 5 minutes that they are quality. Along the way, you'd also get a pretty good picture of the persons strengths and stylistic preferences, which you can use to determine how and where they would fit in with the team(s) you had in mind. The only downsides are that I wasn't always available for these interviews, and the written equivalent intimidating and could take long. Also, various people swore that they either can't perform well in written or verbal conditions, so perhaps letting the candidate choose between the two might be beneficial.

keeptrying 8y ago

Best job board marketing I've seen in a while.

donretag 8y ago

I do not mind whiteboarding at all. I have three whiteboards at home for brainstorming. I draw the line at doing take home tests. I cannot interview a company if I am doing a take home assignment. With whiteboarding, I get to also assess my potential co-workers abilities by seeing if they are asking interesting questions.

api 8y ago

I've been programming since BASIC on a VIC-20 sometime around age 6. I can code in like 10 languages and have written everything from crypto and network protocols to distributed systems, database sync engines, and high throughput video compression/decompression codecs. I always fail whiteboard interviews. I can't code at all on a whiteboard.

nathanaldensr 8y ago
You're the false negative that nearly every software company seems intent on avoiding at all costs... ...and probably a better software developer than 99% of the people they end up hiring.
- api 8y ago
  I ended up starting my own so meh. https://zerotier.com/ https://zerotier.com/

pagbot 8y ago

Cool. A website full of companies to avoid. Thanks for posting!

jasonrhaas 8y ago

Wow, there are so many new ways that people are coming up with to recruit software developers. Clearly there is a problem here that needs to be solved. I understand that the company needs a way to vet people to make sure they are technically proficient for the job. However, there must be a better way of filtering people. I just bailed on a company after they told me what the interview process would be: - Take home coding quiz where you need to sign up and use their algorithm platform. As you would expect, there was asynchronous programming and a recursion algorithm involved (two for one!) - 3 more technical interviews. 2 of which were screen share and/or white boarding sessions. 1 is a "riddle part", which I assume is some kind of brain teaser involving a recursive algorithm. After I saw the coding quiz and all the follow on stuff I just told them I wasn't interested. I was kind of offended, and it didn't put me in a positive mindset towards the company and engineers that worked there.

scruple 8y ago
It all amounts to little more than our industries hazing rituals.
- nathanaldensr 8y ago
  This is what I tell people all the time. That one word sums up nearly every dysfunctional interviewing and filtering process. Hazing. It's just monkeys making sure they only hire other similar-looking and similarly-acting monkeys.

djhworld 8y ago

At my work one part of the interview is a System Design test, where the candidate is presented with a problem and we ask them to come up with a system (i.e. by gathering requirements etc) Usually this means drawing stuff on the whiteboard with boxes and arrows. Not looking for the perfect system or 'correct' solution, just really having a look at what the candidate is experienced in and how they think. Whiteboards are fine for that use case, and can be very expressive. Doing binary search trees and stuff though doesn't seem as useful really.

hellofunk 8y ago

I think whiteboards are much better than the remote code-as-we-watch stuff, which is even more common and not a good way to measure actual work skills.

Shank 8y ago

I really like the idea of this, but how many jobs posted here are for senior or high experience positions? The whiteboard filter can still happen at any of these companies in junior developer ranks. This just creates elitism where the "senior" developers get nice hiring processes, and the junior developers get stuck with traditional torture.

taurath 8y ago
I think its still valid if someone doesn't have a good-size body of work, however the more CS heavy it is and unrelated to the actual work the more you're optimizing for "did this person recently graduate with a CS degree".

slackoverflower 8y ago

FYI All your subscriber's emails are accessible at https://whiteboardfree.com/email_subscribers.json https://whiteboardfree.com/email_subscribers.json since you didn't put any authentication on those endpoints. It's a basic Rails app so I'm guessing other users may got a hold of the list already.

swyx 8y ago
I guess their Privacy Policy checks out https://whiteboardfree.com/privacy https://whiteboardfree.com/privacy
- yeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  belly laughs
danpalmer 8y ago
So you're telling me that someone who created a site to post job adverts for jobs that don't test programming skills, has managed to write a security vulnerability into the site? Never! I don't agree with making candidates write algorithms they don't need to know in a format that they don't need to be able to write them, but I am in favour of testing candidates thoroughly.
CameronBanga 8y ago
This is a pretty crummy wait to disclose a security vulnerability. Yeah, this one is pretty bad. But let’s try to do better, not worse.

tal_berzniz 8y ago

A lot of the important tech decision take place around a whiteboard where people communicate their ideas. Whiteboard questions are okay. Only giving tasks is not how a real workplace work

notadoc 8y ago

If you're interested in someones coding prowess and process, review something they have written with them. It's far more effective than commanding some nervous candidate to get in front of a group of people and start writing code on a wall.

akyu 8y ago

Whiteboarding is fine when done well, horrible when done poorly. The variance is on the side of the interviewers. I've done a lot of interviews over the years, and I've encountered a couple stereotypes: 1. The gotcha interviewers. He pulled out his old algorithm text book and found the hardest problem. 2. The no bullshit interviewer. Asks you to code a somewhat challenging, but solvable problem. No tricks. Basically non-trival fizz buzz problems. The problem with these is there are only so many practical problems you can give before it gets put up on leetcode, and every interviewee has memorized the code. 3. The clueless interviewer. They try to give you a weird mix of an IQ test and a personality test, and maybe throw in a little bit of API trivia while they are at it.

kuon 8y ago

I've been coding for 25 years and I wrote some complicated piece of software, but I would be incapable to write code on a whiteboard.

smnplk 8y ago

Call me racist, but I also don't like blackboards.

EgoIncarnate 8y ago

Maybe Lyft varies it's interviews, but: 1) https://whiteboardfree.com/job_posts/52 https://whiteboardfree.com/job_posts/52 - Lyft - Data Engineering 2) https://eng.lyft.com/interviewing-tips-for-android-engineers-f01ce7fba163 https://eng.lyft.com/interviewing-tips-for-android-engineers... - "Expect a few coding questions either on a whiteboard " ( Dec 21, 2017 ) Pretty sure Netflix (also has a job listed) does whiteboard based evaluation too.

edem 8y ago

So is this supposed to be a good or a bad thing? I've used whiteboards in a lot of interviews to great effect. I wouldn't confuse whiteboards with riddles. I also hate riddles and puzzles because they check for the riddle-solving skill, not the actual skill which will be used at work. Whiteboards are a completely orthogonal topic to riddles.

lscore720 8y ago

Some companies effectivdely use whiteboarding, others don't. This is a true snapshot of the absurd sense of entitlement among some tech workers these days. When the bubble eventually pops, people will look back at this website promotion with awe. It's like challenging the generally accepted standard that interviewees dress up a bit more formally than a typical day at the office (i.e. button down versus old T-shirt).