7 ms·

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'

by 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.
- jimmy1 8y ago
  > Wow, what an incredibly tone deaf response. It's really not though. Here's the bottom line: You want money from a company. The company doesn't owe you jack. shit. If they fucking whiteboard, and you want money from them, then do the whiteboard. Later, when you are employed by them, try to suggest they improve their process. If you have better options, take them. > Maybe changing this prospective is the point of the "incessant whining." Sure. But is that the companies #1 priority, or do they have other things to do, like make money and stay in business that take precedent? Anyways, the way you do this is from within or providing feedback and having conversations with recruiters -- you know, human interaction. This job board is the ultimate culmination of millennial passive-aggressive behavior.
  - aianus 8y ago
    > If you have better options, take them. > This job board is the ultimate culmination of millennial passive-aggressive behavior. This job board just enables more people to pursue a course of action that you're already suggesting they do!
    - jimmy1 8y ago
      I will admit, maybe I am reading too much into the convictions or intentions of the job boards -- but we all are human, so I can only assume this was created by someone who was tired of having to do whiteboards, and rather than confront the problem head on and potentially drive industry-wide change (channeling "one person can change the world"), goes behind the scenes. The job board further fragments and confuses things for everyone. The better option, of course in my opinion, is make things better for everyone by fighting the battle where the companies are. I am frustrated at times just as much as any other engineer by playing "monkey-see-monkey-do" in front of an audience in order to receive employment and I have indeed passed up job offers because I was turned off by the interview process (but again, that was my choice) but if you take a step back, look at the overall job market, and what other workers have to go through to get a job, we really do have it made, and this seems like a minor nuisance at best.
JTbane 8y ago
>I need to know you can do the work And I need to know what the work exactly entails, and what is expected of me. Many interview questions are disjoint with what the job actually requires. >Prove to me you can I can show you my past experience, and I can do technical exercises. What I can't do is devote a ridiculous amount of time and effort to poor questions.
- GordonS 8y ago
  I wish it was that simple :( As someone who has hired a lot of devs over the years (almost exclusively for our offshore team in India, but sometimes in the EU), I can tell you that the number of candidates who embellish and down right lie about their capabilities and past experience is shocking. Truth is, I hate both sides of the interview divide, as interviewer and interviewee - it's a horrible, inefficient, flawed process regardless which side you're on, and nobody has the answers.
  - Clubber 8y ago
    If Indian offshoring teams constantly lie about their credentials way more than local, I would think having different interview processes for different sources of candidates would be a better option than a process for the lowest common denominator.
    - GordonS 8y ago
      Yes, I do agree to a point. People outside of India often embellish or exaggerate too though, even if not close to the degree that I've experienced in India (disclaimer: this is my own opinion based on my own experiences over 10 years or so. Obviously India has a lot of great, honest Engineers, our organisation never sees them though, largely because we don't pay well enough).
  - taurath 8y ago
    A good reputation with solid references that are checked from real engineers and managers that you actually delivered a good product seems like it would suffice to override the straight up lying, to me. Is that not the case?
stronglikedan 8y ago
> a take home technical exercise > prove to me you can (do the work) A take home exercise only proves they can get the work done elsewhere. It doesn't prove that they actually did it.
- phendrenad2 8y ago
  This whole thing misses the point. We need WhiteboardFreeAndAlsoTakeHomeFree. In other industries, my resume and a quick discussion verifying that I actually did the work I said I did is suffficient
  - mkohlmyr 8y ago
    I really don't buy that a resume alone can sufficiently put across your actual level of ability as a Software Engineer. And there are plenty of people who are better talkers than doers. One way or another I think it's entirely reasonable to want to see actual code. If you want to do that by way of an open source portfolio, sure. But not everyone has open source contributions, so then I would need some other process for acquiring a work sample. I have seen many people here say you should hire people on a contract basis for a few days/a week. I don't know what it's like doing that in the US, but for the UK market that sounds like a ton of administrative overhead for both parties to take on in order to establish if they are even a good fit.
    - sidlls 8y ago
      This style of interview works in plenty of other professions that are much more rigorous than software development. You'll be hard pressed to find an aerospace engineering company that is going to ask candidates to evaluate integrals on the whiteboard that they'd normally look up in the CRC or implement a numerical solution for (probably using a prepackaged library), for example. Yet you're proposing an analog of this very thing here.
    - actionowl 8y ago
      > But not everyone has open source contributions In my experience, anyone we've hired WITH open source contributions has been 10x better than those without.
sam0x17 8y ago
If you had to do 6 consecutive coding interviews only to be rejected on the last one, you'd whine too.
- doorbumper 8y ago
  What really gets me is when you pass all 6, only to be told that you did great but there are no suitable positions open.

by crsv 8y ago

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.

jimmy1 8y ago
> Wow, what an incredibly tone deaf response. It's really not though. Here's the bottom line: You want money from a company. The company doesn't owe you jack. shit. If they fucking whiteboard, and you want money from them, then do the whiteboard. Later, when you are employed by them, try to suggest they improve their process. If you have better options, take them. > Maybe changing this prospective is the point of the "incessant whining." Sure. But is that the companies #1 priority, or do they have other things to do, like make money and stay in business that take precedent? Anyways, the way you do this is from within or providing feedback and having conversations with recruiters -- you know, human interaction. This job board is the ultimate culmination of millennial passive-aggressive behavior.
- aianus 8y ago
  > If you have better options, take them. > This job board is the ultimate culmination of millennial passive-aggressive behavior. This job board just enables more people to pursue a course of action that you're already suggesting they do!
  - jimmy1 8y ago
    I will admit, maybe I am reading too much into the convictions or intentions of the job boards -- but we all are human, so I can only assume this was created by someone who was tired of having to do whiteboards, and rather than confront the problem head on and potentially drive industry-wide change (channeling "one person can change the world"), goes behind the scenes. The job board further fragments and confuses things for everyone. The better option, of course in my opinion, is make things better for everyone by fighting the battle where the companies are. I am frustrated at times just as much as any other engineer by playing "monkey-see-monkey-do" in front of an audience in order to receive employment and I have indeed passed up job offers because I was turned off by the interview process (but again, that was my choice) but if you take a step back, look at the overall job market, and what other workers have to go through to get a job, we really do have it made, and this seems like a minor nuisance at best.

JTbane 8y ago

>I need to know you can do the work And I need to know what the work exactly entails, and what is expected of me. Many interview questions are disjoint with what the job actually requires. >Prove to me you can I can show you my past experience, and I can do technical exercises. What I can't do is devote a ridiculous amount of time and effort to poor questions.

GordonS 8y ago
I wish it was that simple :( As someone who has hired a lot of devs over the years (almost exclusively for our offshore team in India, but sometimes in the EU), I can tell you that the number of candidates who embellish and down right lie about their capabilities and past experience is shocking. Truth is, I hate both sides of the interview divide, as interviewer and interviewee - it's a horrible, inefficient, flawed process regardless which side you're on, and nobody has the answers.
- Clubber 8y ago
  If Indian offshoring teams constantly lie about their credentials way more than local, I would think having different interview processes for different sources of candidates would be a better option than a process for the lowest common denominator.
  - GordonS 8y ago
    Yes, I do agree to a point. People outside of India often embellish or exaggerate too though, even if not close to the degree that I've experienced in India (disclaimer: this is my own opinion based on my own experiences over 10 years or so. Obviously India has a lot of great, honest Engineers, our organisation never sees them though, largely because we don't pay well enough).
- taurath 8y ago
  A good reputation with solid references that are checked from real engineers and managers that you actually delivered a good product seems like it would suffice to override the straight up lying, to me. Is that not the case?

stronglikedan 8y ago

> a take home technical exercise > prove to me you can (do the work) A take home exercise only proves they can get the work done elsewhere. It doesn't prove that they actually did it.

phendrenad2 8y ago
This whole thing misses the point. We need WhiteboardFreeAndAlsoTakeHomeFree. In other industries, my resume and a quick discussion verifying that I actually did the work I said I did is suffficient
- mkohlmyr 8y ago
  I really don't buy that a resume alone can sufficiently put across your actual level of ability as a Software Engineer. And there are plenty of people who are better talkers than doers. One way or another I think it's entirely reasonable to want to see actual code. If you want to do that by way of an open source portfolio, sure. But not everyone has open source contributions, so then I would need some other process for acquiring a work sample. I have seen many people here say you should hire people on a contract basis for a few days/a week. I don't know what it's like doing that in the US, but for the UK market that sounds like a ton of administrative overhead for both parties to take on in order to establish if they are even a good fit.
  - sidlls 8y ago
    This style of interview works in plenty of other professions that are much more rigorous than software development. You'll be hard pressed to find an aerospace engineering company that is going to ask candidates to evaluate integrals on the whiteboard that they'd normally look up in the CRC or implement a numerical solution for (probably using a prepackaged library), for example. Yet you're proposing an analog of this very thing here.
  - actionowl 8y ago
    > But not everyone has open source contributions In my experience, anyone we've hired WITH open source contributions has been 10x better than those without.

sam0x17 8y ago

If you had to do 6 consecutive coding interviews only to be rejected on the last one, you'd whine too.

doorbumper 8y ago
What really gets me is when you pass all 6, only to be told that you did great but there are no suitable positions open.