5 ms·

BALL-PITS and CLOWN NOSES I worked with a guy, Bob, in our college computer room. Bob had returned to get his BS after many years in industry. He had great sto

by daly 8y ago

BALL-PITS and CLOWN NOSES I worked with a guy, Bob, in our college computer room. Bob had returned to get his BS after many years in industry. He had great stories. He also had great advice. He taught me that you can learn a lot about how a company will treat their employees by paying attention to the way they treat you during the interview. He suggested several sign that indicated it was best to just "walk away". If you go into a restaurant for a professional lunch meeting and they have a ball-pit / swing set /etc. it might not be the most professional place to hold the meeting. Just walk away. If you go to a 5 star restaurant and they want you to wear a clown nose (Everybody Does It!) Just walk away. The big scam is "We hire the best and the brightest". "We mandate a whiteboard test (Everybody Does It)". It is my opinion (based on experience) that companies that insist on a whiteboard test, despite years of programming on your resume and open source code, are either Ball-Pit companies (who don't know what it means to be a professional) or Clown-Nose companies (who know what it means to be a professional but still treat you like a commodity). Just walk away. When you object, please reference one study in a journal that shows that whiteboard tests are effective in any measure when used during interviews. I understand why Google does it. I've even interviewed there. They get thousands of resumes (which they never read, at least nobody did at my interviews). They have to weed out the "learn coding in 6 weeks" crowd. But you're a professional. You should expect to be treated like one. You don't ask your surgeon to cut up hams in an interview. You don't ask your builder to nail two boards together. Professional accountants are not interviewd by bank tellers and ask to count change. Google, like Microsoft before it (remember the "why are manholes round? quizes?"), have combined the marketing claim "We hire the best and brightest" with the ball-pit mentality of whiteboarding. Google HR (sorry, People Resource?) SHOULD be embarrassed but apparently they, and upper management, LIKE ball-pits. A real professional interview involves a discussion about what the company does, what it current problems are (aka why are they hiring), and a discussion of if you, as a professional, have the skills to solve the problem. What do they need? How can you contribute? It is likely that your interviewer has no idea what you are being interviewed for and cannot answer these basic questions. We, as professionals, should consider whiteboarding as an insult. Just walk away.

marssaxman 8y ago
I'd have to "just walk away" from the entire industry, since I've never once in over twenty years had an interview which did not involve a demonstration of my ability to reason through a problem and communicate a proposed solution using conversation and a whiteboard. I am a professional, yes, and thinking about problems and communicating about solutions is my job; why should I be offended that someone wants me to show them how I work? Why would I ever want to hire someone incapable of demonstrating their skills in such a simple, straightforward way? If you can't solve a toy problem and explain your solution, or at least have a conversation about the constraints and tradeoffs as you work on it, how am I to imagine there is any chance you could be a productive teammate?
- daly 8y ago
  That's nice in theory. But it doesn't fit the facts. 1) The whiteboard questions are unrelated to the job opening. The interviewers have no idea why you are there. They don't know what your resume says. They don't know who you might be working for. They don't know what you might be working on. Would you hire someone to work for you without knowing if they were going to clean your house, install new lighting, or rebuild your kitchen? How exactly would you interview a person if you don't know why you need their skills? Or how their skills are related to the task? Asking a carpenter to "whiteboard" the steps to clean a bathtub during an interview is insulting. 2) The interview is being conducted by people who have almost no job experience. My experience is that the interviewers are recent college graduates. And that the whiteboard questions are related to their data structures class. They are focused on details like worst-case behavior of the algorithm and whether you can quote the log-log-n asymtotic performance. This entirely ignores the fact that the actual behavior depends a lot on the actual measured performance. Take, for example, my paper on garbage collection (http://daly.axiom-developer.org/TimothyDaly_files/Bozm84.pdf http://daly.axiom-developer.org/TimothyDaly_files/Bozm84.pdf) where the actual data access pattern matters. Theoretically strong algorithms usually exhibit bad behavior because of data access patterns, CPU caches, look-aside buffering, and/or branch prediction failures. 3) There is no known relation between being effective and being able to present information. I know people who are strongly autistic, to the point of not making actual eye contact or giving any verbal feedback at all, appearing to be "not paying attention"... and then create beautifully crafted excellent code. I also know people who "talk a good game" and couldn't write a "hello world" page in html. Please point me to any study that shows that whiteboarding is an effective way to judge candidates. Even Google's HR head claims it is ineffective. 4) There is a ball-pit / clown nose aspect to the interview. "Everybody does it" so wear the clown nose. I've had a fair number of interviews in my 48 year career. Most of them were with people who needed something done and I could demonstrate my ability to do that. Interviews exist for a reason. Asking me to whiteboard Knuth-Bendix because you're writing an editor is reasonable. But the same question for a customer service job would be nonsense. These "clown-nose" interviews are simply insulting and a waste of time. Walk away.

by daly 8y ago

marssaxman 8y ago

I'd have to "just walk away" from the entire industry, since I've never once in over twenty years had an interview which did not involve a demonstration of my ability to reason through a problem and communicate a proposed solution using conversation and a whiteboard. I am a professional, yes, and thinking about problems and communicating about solutions is my job; why should I be offended that someone wants me to show them how I work? Why would I ever want to hire someone incapable of demonstrating their skills in such a simple, straightforward way? If you can't solve a toy problem and explain your solution, or at least have a conversation about the constraints and tradeoffs as you work on it, how am I to imagine there is any chance you could be a productive teammate?

daly 8y ago
That's nice in theory. But it doesn't fit the facts. 1) The whiteboard questions are unrelated to the job opening. The interviewers have no idea why you are there. They don't know what your resume says. They don't know who you might be working for. They don't know what you might be working on. Would you hire someone to work for you without knowing if they were going to clean your house, install new lighting, or rebuild your kitchen? How exactly would you interview a person if you don't know why you need their skills? Or how their skills are related to the task? Asking a carpenter to "whiteboard" the steps to clean a bathtub during an interview is insulting. 2) The interview is being conducted by people who have almost no job experience. My experience is that the interviewers are recent college graduates. And that the whiteboard questions are related to their data structures class. They are focused on details like worst-case behavior of the algorithm and whether you can quote the log-log-n asymtotic performance. This entirely ignores the fact that the actual behavior depends a lot on the actual measured performance. Take, for example, my paper on garbage collection (http://daly.axiom-developer.org/TimothyDaly_files/Bozm84.pdf http://daly.axiom-developer.org/TimothyDaly_files/Bozm84.pdf) where the actual data access pattern matters. Theoretically strong algorithms usually exhibit bad behavior because of data access patterns, CPU caches, look-aside buffering, and/or branch prediction failures. 3) There is no known relation between being effective and being able to present information. I know people who are strongly autistic, to the point of not making actual eye contact or giving any verbal feedback at all, appearing to be "not paying attention"... and then create beautifully crafted excellent code. I also know people who "talk a good game" and couldn't write a "hello world" page in html. Please point me to any study that shows that whiteboarding is an effective way to judge candidates. Even Google's HR head claims it is ineffective. 4) There is a ball-pit / clown nose aspect to the interview. "Everybody does it" so wear the clown nose. I've had a fair number of interviews in my 48 year career. Most of them were with people who needed something done and I could demonstrate my ability to do that. Interviews exist for a reason. Asking me to whiteboard Knuth-Bendix because you're writing an editor is reasonable. But the same question for a customer service job would be nonsense. These "clown-nose" interviews are simply insulting and a waste of time. Walk away.