6 ms·

“Jotting down some code on a whiteboard” with a colleague is a much lower stress scenario than deriving and writing down, under a time limit, some DP algorithm

“Jotting down some code on a whiteboard” with a colleague is a much lower stress scenario than deriving and writing down, under a time limit, some DP algorithm you might not have used since college, and proving its correctness and run time to some stranger who may be barely out of college themselves.

recursive 8y ago
Interviews are necessarily more stressful than typical work. That's not just a property of whiteboard coding.
- pmiller2 8y ago
  More stressful, sure. For many people, whiteboard coding is disproportionately more stressful than typical work, and that’s the problem.
  - lfowles 8y ago
    One particular expectation when whiteboard coding for an interview is that there is little/no downtime, you must be making progress or talking about your thoughts. Incidentally, 50% of my thought process then becomes "How do I talk about what I'm thinking about? Oh no, I'm only thinking about talking about what I'm thinking about..."
    - ubernostrum 8y ago
      I'm working on a large-ish project right now, and into one of the more tricky bits literally today. And you know what? I take breaks. I go read something on the internet or post a comment, or I go for a walk, or I go do one of the smaller housekeeping tickets I keep in my queue to give my brain a rest from continually focusing on the hard parts of the problem. Can't do that in a whiteboard session.
      - hackits 8y ago
        Most of the time their technology stack with be vastly different than anything else you've worked with. There will be other people you will need to discuss and coordinate with. Articulating your thoughts and expressing yourself clearly and concisely is more important. Vast majority of the technical problems have been solved and its delivery a solution to a business problem that is the most important aspect.
    - hackits 8y ago
      For this reason I don't do living coding sessions. People have asked me `why` which I politely say the answer is no. They seem to like the boundaries I set for myself and my project's more than some sort of white board. Yes, I've been turned down for jobs over the white board but I've had more positive results than negative.
- stlHusker 8y ago
  "Interviews are necessarily more stressful than typical work. That's not just a property of whiteboard coding." My sister, a pediatric ER nurse would disagree with you. The interviews are largely behavioral and are a breeze. No dummy is wheeled in with head trauma, random "new" diseases aren't invented and asked to be treated, etc. The simple fact of the matter is if hospitals hired in the same way, they would have no staff.
  - pavel_lishin 8y ago
    I would argue that a piece of paper showing that someone attended school and graduated and is licensed to be an ER nurse carries much more weight than a piece of paper showing that I'm allegedly qualified to be a software engineer. I know it's totally anecdotal, but we've all heard horror stories about candidates who couldn't write a for loop; some of us have witnessed these things first hand. And yes, phone screens should be filtering out those sorts of candidates long before they start sweating with a dry-erase marker in their hand, but, well. How likely is an applicant for a nursing job to flat out not know how to stitch up a wound, or to take a patient's pulse and temperature?
    - stlHusker 8y ago
      Again, the op stated these things are put there to "show how people react to stress" -- my post was a response to that, there is no re-creation of a stressful environment in the situations I stated. "I know it's totally anecdotal, but we've all heard horror stories about candidates who couldn't write a for loop; some of us have witnessed these things first hand. And yes, phone screens should be filtering out those sorts of candidates long before they start sweating with a dry-erase marker in their hand, but, well." Yes, it is a failure of how you have set up your hiring pipeline which you are now band-aiding. The majority of those folks can be screened by one look at a resume or in the first 30 seconds of the phone interview. Other hiring managers in our company repeatedly had this problem until we got them to focus of the right candidate qualities and ask the appropriate questions. Take for example your local symphony orchestra; they have the same problem where people with visions of "making it" show up not being able to play at all. Want to audition? Send us an audition tape and a check. When you show up for the audition, you'll play a selection from these pieces and be asked to sight read this music. It is ironic that for an industry that is in a sense so subjective that the gates in the hiring process are more concrete. To make an analogy, the software world is akin to: Interviewer: "I see you are interviewing for the 1rst chair violin. The 3rd chair tuba player is really into experimental music, he would like to transpose Vivaldi's Four Seasons into a new scale with 12.5 notes per octave with a slight progressive jazz leaning. Oh, and since we all know there is pressure in performing in front of an audience, you have 30 seconds to think before the 2nd chair begins to throw rotten food at you. Reaction to stress and all you know...here is your tuba." "But I don't play tuba...Are you asking me to play tuba? Am I going to be playing this nutcase's new music as part of our program?" "Sigh...you don't know music do you?"
- jpindar 8y ago
  As an embedded systems engineer, I disagree. I have never been asked to design a circuit, or even pseudocode firmware, on a whiteboard. In the electronics manufacturing industry, interviews consist of talking, mostly about projects I've worked on before and projects they've done before. Occasionally someone will give me the same written test they give technicians, but those tend to be pretty easy.
pavel_lishin 8y ago
I don't think people should play CS-quizshow during whiteboard interviews. Being asked to implement a breadth-first search, or whatever, is kind of annoying - especially since there's effectively one correct answer. At best, you're testing my memory and whether I read the right interview book. I had to do that at my last interview. I got through it ok-ish. The more interesting question was a more general system design question - how would I architect a system to do X, under constraints Y and Z. What would I do if a new constraint came up? Ok, now how would I make it more resilient? There, the whiteboards is just a tool I can use, not the primary focus.
- scarejunba 8y ago
  Surely not BFS. That's something you can figure out from first principles and knowledge of some data structures like stacks and queues, but I'd expect knowledge of those data structures anyway.
  - pmiller2 8y ago
    You’d be amazed at how little some otherwise competent people can figure out from first principles in an interview in front of a whiteboard.
  - throwawayboye 8y ago
    I don’t care if candidates can figure out BFS under intense pressure in 30-60 minutes. That is nobody’s job anywhere ever. I want to know if someone can think creatively, if they’re a pain in the ass to work with, if they’re thoughtful and careful or if they shoot from the hip. Admittedly, these are hard to measure (which is one reason why I would support some kind of mild licensure, but that’s a different subject), but being able to derive BFS does not correlate with competence or ability. Maybe if you’re doing router hacking or something, I guess, but specific algorithms are so little of most developers’ careers. Honestly, we all might as well read chicken entrails because that would be about as predictive as our current interview practices.
  - pavel_lishin 8y ago
    Sure, I can, and I did, although I didn't come up with the super-hindsight-obvious solution I'm sure I learned three times over in college. But it's the interview equivalent of your driving instructor making sure you adjust your side and rear view mirrors before you start the car.
dionidium 8y ago
> some DP algorithm you might not have used since college, and proving its correctness and run time to some stranger who may be barely out of college themselves. I'm not opposed to white-boarding, but to reinforce this point I'll note that I would have done much better on some of these problems when I was just out of college than I would today, because they were all fresh in my mind. I assure you I wasn't a better programmer or employee then.

recursive 8y ago

Interviews are necessarily more stressful than typical work. That's not just a property of whiteboard coding.

pmiller2 8y ago
More stressful, sure. For many people, whiteboard coding is disproportionately more stressful than typical work, and that’s the problem.
- lfowles 8y ago
  One particular expectation when whiteboard coding for an interview is that there is little/no downtime, you must be making progress or talking about your thoughts. Incidentally, 50% of my thought process then becomes "How do I talk about what I'm thinking about? Oh no, I'm only thinking about talking about what I'm thinking about..."
  - ubernostrum 8y ago
    I'm working on a large-ish project right now, and into one of the more tricky bits literally today. And you know what? I take breaks. I go read something on the internet or post a comment, or I go for a walk, or I go do one of the smaller housekeeping tickets I keep in my queue to give my brain a rest from continually focusing on the hard parts of the problem. Can't do that in a whiteboard session.
    - hackits 8y ago
      Most of the time their technology stack with be vastly different than anything else you've worked with. There will be other people you will need to discuss and coordinate with. Articulating your thoughts and expressing yourself clearly and concisely is more important. Vast majority of the technical problems have been solved and its delivery a solution to a business problem that is the most important aspect.
  - hackits 8y ago
    For this reason I don't do living coding sessions. People have asked me `why` which I politely say the answer is no. They seem to like the boundaries I set for myself and my project's more than some sort of white board. Yes, I've been turned down for jobs over the white board but I've had more positive results than negative.
stlHusker 8y ago
"Interviews are necessarily more stressful than typical work. That's not just a property of whiteboard coding." My sister, a pediatric ER nurse would disagree with you. The interviews are largely behavioral and are a breeze. No dummy is wheeled in with head trauma, random "new" diseases aren't invented and asked to be treated, etc. The simple fact of the matter is if hospitals hired in the same way, they would have no staff.
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  I would argue that a piece of paper showing that someone attended school and graduated and is licensed to be an ER nurse carries much more weight than a piece of paper showing that I'm allegedly qualified to be a software engineer. I know it's totally anecdotal, but we've all heard horror stories about candidates who couldn't write a for loop; some of us have witnessed these things first hand. And yes, phone screens should be filtering out those sorts of candidates long before they start sweating with a dry-erase marker in their hand, but, well. How likely is an applicant for a nursing job to flat out not know how to stitch up a wound, or to take a patient's pulse and temperature?
  - stlHusker 8y ago
    Again, the op stated these things are put there to "show how people react to stress" -- my post was a response to that, there is no re-creation of a stressful environment in the situations I stated. "I know it's totally anecdotal, but we've all heard horror stories about candidates who couldn't write a for loop; some of us have witnessed these things first hand. And yes, phone screens should be filtering out those sorts of candidates long before they start sweating with a dry-erase marker in their hand, but, well." Yes, it is a failure of how you have set up your hiring pipeline which you are now band-aiding. The majority of those folks can be screened by one look at a resume or in the first 30 seconds of the phone interview. Other hiring managers in our company repeatedly had this problem until we got them to focus of the right candidate qualities and ask the appropriate questions. Take for example your local symphony orchestra; they have the same problem where people with visions of "making it" show up not being able to play at all. Want to audition? Send us an audition tape and a check. When you show up for the audition, you'll play a selection from these pieces and be asked to sight read this music. It is ironic that for an industry that is in a sense so subjective that the gates in the hiring process are more concrete. To make an analogy, the software world is akin to: Interviewer: "I see you are interviewing for the 1rst chair violin. The 3rd chair tuba player is really into experimental music, he would like to transpose Vivaldi's Four Seasons into a new scale with 12.5 notes per octave with a slight progressive jazz leaning. Oh, and since we all know there is pressure in performing in front of an audience, you have 30 seconds to think before the 2nd chair begins to throw rotten food at you. Reaction to stress and all you know...here is your tuba." "But I don't play tuba...Are you asking me to play tuba? Am I going to be playing this nutcase's new music as part of our program?" "Sigh...you don't know music do you?"
jpindar 8y ago
As an embedded systems engineer, I disagree. I have never been asked to design a circuit, or even pseudocode firmware, on a whiteboard. In the electronics manufacturing industry, interviews consist of talking, mostly about projects I've worked on before and projects they've done before. Occasionally someone will give me the same written test they give technicians, but those tend to be pretty easy.

pavel_lishin 8y ago

I don't think people should play CS-quizshow during whiteboard interviews. Being asked to implement a breadth-first search, or whatever, is kind of annoying - especially since there's effectively one correct answer. At best, you're testing my memory and whether I read the right interview book. I had to do that at my last interview. I got through it ok-ish. The more interesting question was a more general system design question - how would I architect a system to do X, under constraints Y and Z. What would I do if a new constraint came up? Ok, now how would I make it more resilient? There, the whiteboards is just a tool I can use, not the primary focus.

scarejunba 8y ago
Surely not BFS. That's something you can figure out from first principles and knowledge of some data structures like stacks and queues, but I'd expect knowledge of those data structures anyway.
- pmiller2 8y ago
  You’d be amazed at how little some otherwise competent people can figure out from first principles in an interview in front of a whiteboard.
- throwawayboye 8y ago
  I don’t care if candidates can figure out BFS under intense pressure in 30-60 minutes. That is nobody’s job anywhere ever. I want to know if someone can think creatively, if they’re a pain in the ass to work with, if they’re thoughtful and careful or if they shoot from the hip. Admittedly, these are hard to measure (which is one reason why I would support some kind of mild licensure, but that’s a different subject), but being able to derive BFS does not correlate with competence or ability. Maybe if you’re doing router hacking or something, I guess, but specific algorithms are so little of most developers’ careers. Honestly, we all might as well read chicken entrails because that would be about as predictive as our current interview practices.
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  Sure, I can, and I did, although I didn't come up with the super-hindsight-obvious solution I'm sure I learned three times over in college. But it's the interview equivalent of your driving instructor making sure you adjust your side and rear view mirrors before you start the car.

dionidium 8y ago

> some DP algorithm you might not have used since college, and proving its correctness and run time to some stranger who may be barely out of college themselves. I'm not opposed to white-boarding, but to reinforce this point I'll note that I would have done much better on some of these problems when I was just out of college than I would today, because they were all fresh in my mind. I assure you I wasn't a better programmer or employee then.