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If we stipulate that whiteboard interviews might be useful for evaluating candidates in some cases, a good whiteboard interview would have specific criteria exp
by jdauriemma 7y ago
If we stipulate that whiteboard interviews might be useful for evaluating candidates in some cases, a good whiteboard interview would have specific criteria expressed in some sort of rubric or other document. That document would be shared with the candidate and evaluator(s) in advance of the interview. This ensures that the candidate and evaluators have a shared notion of what constitutes success before the interview. An opaque process, unfortunately, can cultivate the type of suspicion that you're expressing here. It sounds like your whiteboard interviews did not give you a good sense of the types of skills they were looking to evaluate during the interview.
I think it's great that you have such high self-esteem and aren't doubting yourself just because some other people don't see your value. That said, I think more data is needed before concluding that whiteboard interviews in general are tantamount to an age filter.
Edit: please note that I have said "if we stipulate," not "if we accept as an a priori truth" that whiteboard interviews are good. It's simply a rhetorical device for evaluating whether or not your whiteboard interview is at risk for evaluator bias.
- Kapura 7y agoThis is a ridiculous position to take. The amount of code that I have to write on a whiteboard to successfully do my job as an engineer is shockingly close to nil. The very notion of having a whiteboard section for a programming job is insane. You wouldn't expect a driver's test to include a significant oral portion, where the drivers spend an hour describing how they would parallel park. A whiteboard interview makes just as much sense, regardless if you're sharing a rubric.
- jdauriemma 7y agoI happen to agree that whiteboarding is not a good use of time in an interview, at least that's what I've concluded from my own experience. But not everyone shares that opinion. And for what it's worth, I'd take a whiteboard interview with specific, measurable criteria for success over a coding challenge with no transparency any day of the week. Please note I said "if we were to stipulate," implying that some teams value whiteboard interviews in good faith, not that I'm advocating for investing 30-60 precious minutes in an exercise that might not align well with what your team values in a colleague. Edit: I'd also like to point out that parallel parking is a well-defined task with a narrow set of criteria for success. Creating valuable software is not such an easily-measured endeavor.
- twblalock 7y agoWhether or not whiteboard interviews make sense for programmers is a different question than whether or not they are intended as an age filter.
- Kapura 7y agoIf there is a portion of a programming interview that doesn't make sense for programmers; but the results of this section skew the results of the interview highly towards recent college graduates, what would you say is going on?
- jdauriemma 7y agoI think you're addressing a symptom, not a problem. When any candidate evaluation process is opaque, you invite bias into the process. Whether whiteboard interviews are useful or not is subject to debate (it's not a factual statement that whiteboard interviews are universally bad). Whether a whiteboard interview is done fairly and without bias is a different proposition altogether, and the interviewers can do a lot in order to address this concern.
- twblalock 7y agoThere are also portions of most interviews, e.g. system design questions, that heavily favor senior candidates.
- kian 7y agoIt seems like a whiteboard is more akin to the paper drivers test, which is a significant, non-driving part of getting a license. While whiteboard interviews can easily descend into gotcha-type puzzles with the wrong interviewer, that in itself is a solid sign you don't want to work for that company - they've failed your test, and they've done it in a nice, easy to comprehend way. Thank them and move on. If, on the other hand, the problem with whiteboard interviews is that they're asking someone to come up with 'trivial recursive solutions' and 'know things somebody who just graduated might about data structures and algorithms'... While I agree that many positions do not require a solid, able-to-apply-at-a-moment's-notice knowledge of the above, I can't think of a single one that wouldn't have severely benefitted from having that knowledge. If someone is unable to use basic recursion, recognize patterns in their problems and refactor them using higher abstractions (or just know of the existence of the higher abstractions in the first place and solve the problem more easily because of it), figure out how to put together basic data structures and algorithms, or even attempt to think through out loud how they would solve a problem they don't know the solution to, it isn't ageism - it's discovering that someone isn't the right fit for how you imagine the engineering culture at your company should be.