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When I was self-studying social psychology I came across social facilitation theory and found it applicable to understanding interviewing. People have a hard t
by lemony_fresh 7y ago
When I was self-studying social psychology I came across social facilitation theory and found it applicable to understanding interviewing. People have a hard time performing complex tasks while other people are watching because their working memory is monitoring the social situation. This varies for each individual. For tasks that have been rehearsed, like a musical or dance routine, they perform better. Politeness theory is applicable as well, people want to be liked and at the same time do not want their autonomy challenged. My pet theory is that the whiteboarding epidemic is a status hierarchy game essentially communicating "if you want to work here, you are going to do what I say."
- emaginniss 7y agoI disagree completely about your theory. I have been on both ends of the whiteboard interview an almost uncountable time during my career. What it has always come down to in my mind is a collaborative process to solve a problem where the one performing the task is trying to solve the problem, while the giver of the task makes suggestions and points out weaknesses before they get out of control. I'm sure there are sadists who just want to watch people squirm while trying to solve an extremely complicated problem, but I don't think I've ever run into that in an interview and it has never been what I've put people through.
- paulkon 7y agoIn that case, why use a whiteboard instead of a collaborative text editor like coderpad, repl.it, or even gnu screen? Testing in an environment completely different from 'production' isn't going to give a super strong signal on collaborative problem solving imo.
- sarbaz 7y ago> it has never been what I've put people through. How can you tell? Is this always based on how you experienced the interview, or do you ask candidates afterwards how they felt? (no insult intended, but) you made an empirical statement, and I'm curious where your evidence is from.
- mancerayder 7y agoI've had whiteboard interviews where the interviewer stays silent while taking notes. I failed 100% of them with various, strangely random feedback by HR/recruiter. I've come to conclude it's the hiring mechanism of social incompetents / unempathetic sciency types. And it was always a dev from another group than the one I was applying for. No thanks.
- lemony_fresh 7y agoWould you allow junior developers to whiteboard a highly qualified and accomplished CTO candidate? No. It is acceptable for peers who will be competing with the candidate in the promotions tournament or the hiring managers to conduct whiteboarding exercises.
- gwbas1c 7y ago> "if you want to work here, you are going to do what I say." I recently started pointing that out, in a roundabout way, when I run interviews. Why? If a candidate starts arguing about xml versus JSON, the candidate misses the point when I bring up xml. (Hint, I only discuss xml because it allows discussing widely known concepts that are very general and have little to do with xml versus JSON.) Or, if a candidate says to me, "why can't we use async-await" in a particular question, the candidate also misses the point of the question. (Hint, I'm trying to test knowledge of concepts that's easy to test when doing something without async=await.) Interview questions are always contrived and end up as an "if you want to work here, you are going to do what I say" exercise. If a candidate can't work within the constraints of a short interview exercise, then what will happen when the constraints of the job come into play? We never get to use our favorite patterns and APIs all the time.
- jonhankok 7y agoWow, if I was in an interview where the interviewer was that closed-minded, I would definitely turn down an offer but I might just walk out. If they are unwilling to consider even discussing useful patterns in an interview, working there must be hell.