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I'm even older than you and have no problem with using a whiteboard during interviews. That said, interviewers who get hung up about precise syntax are poor in

by rmah 7y ago

I'm even older than you and have no problem with using a whiteboard during interviews. That said, interviewers who get hung up about precise syntax are poor interviewers and need coaching. Or are just looking for an excuse to ding someone. More to the point, I don't see how asking to put answers to technical questions on a whiteboard favors younger people over older people.

crimsonalucard 7y ago
A lot of programming involves design and structure. Whiteboard interviews are biased towards algorithms involving problems that are typically trivial solved with library functions like sort. A whiteboard interviewer typically finds some type of "library" problem, gives it a little twist and throws it at a senior programmer who's been doing design and structure for years. The candidate out of school, meanwhile, recently took an algorithms course. So for the older candidate to keep up with the younger one the older one actually has to go and study stuff UNRELATED to work. I find it strange that you can be older than the Parent poster but not realize this fact.
- pdpi 7y ago
  Depends a lot on the places you're interviewing at. The places that are bad at interviewing have the exact problems you're describing. Better places test for more real-world skills. The best places tailor the questions to the expected seniority of the candidate. If the GP has had some amount of luck and/or skill with picking the places they interview at, they might not have experienced this too much.
shubb 7y ago
I think when he says 'white board interview', he means 'algorithms and data structures screen, which may or may not be on a whiteboard'. So, for instance, you could give a data science applicant a dataset and pandas and tell them to make you a report 'about sales projections' then see what they come back with. Or you could ask them to sort a list of strings in log(n) time and n space using a recursive solution. The first test would probably benifit an experieced applicant because hopefully they will have a better understanding of what buisness actually needs. The second test would benifit a recent graduate, because they will have done algorithms 101 more recently and remember a canned solution. Of course, experienced applicants will revise this sort of problem and play on hacker rank for a couple months before a job hunt, so it will also benifit candidates who are actively job hunting, rather than applying for a specific oppertunity
01100011 7y ago
Same here, but that's only because I practiced. WB coding is a skill like any other, barring a physical issue which prevents you from writing on the WB. I do sympathize though. The older I get, the slower I tend to think and the more silly mistakes I make. WBC is not a good way to show off my skills. Frankly I think WBC in general is biased towards the type of rote learners who grind through leetcode problems and know how to regurgitate canned answers, but that is dependent on your interviewer.
- zerogvt 7y ago
  It is strongly advised that if you get a question you've already practiced then you should tell your interviewers. At least that's the supposed code of conduct. So, what you're suggesting is that the code of conduct is just words and this is all just a set of moves that we have to go through.
  - asark 7y ago
    What code of conduct? Who advises that? Expecting that to be followed seems like it would just disadvantage honest hard studiers and honest people who actually do figure out the solution on the spot, while rewarding dishonest talented performers who also happen to be hard studiers—so unless that's what you're trying to select for....
    - zerogvt 7y ago
      It's in the bible for the WB religion http://www.crackingthecodinginterview.com/ http://www.crackingthecodinginterview.com/ See - I've even gone through that. I'm that diligent.
      - asark 7y ago
        Hahaha, touché. I either missed or forgot that bit. Guess I fail the test :-)
- mreome 7y ago
  I think "WB coding is a skill like any other" is exactly the point. It's a skill that does not really apply to the day-to-day work of most programmers though, so using WB coding as a criterion favors those who have the time to hone it, or are recent grads (the exams in many CS courses get quite close to white board programming). It's unclear that it's a direct proxy for age, but it's easy to see that many more senior programmers would have neither the time no recent academic experience to have that particular skill well-practiced.
ryanisnan 7y ago
I agree. What would age have to do with recalling syntactic idiosyncrasies, or being able to theorize about problems with a dry-erase marker and a whiteboard (or a pen and pencil, or a keyboard and a computer)? Reading between the lines, you seem upset about having to answer questions about technical problems you perceive to be irrelevant, and that these technical problems are more likely to be solved successfully by those who have recently practiced them (e.g. graduates). I too agree that, while abstract technical interview questions have little bearing on most day-to-day work, they do some things quite well: 1 - Define a well-bounded problem of sufficient difficulty 2 - Give the interviewee a good baseline for objective success 3 - Exercise a person's mind to think about complicated problems While they are contrived and not entirely representative of daily work, they are not without value.
- zerogvt 7y ago
  There is some value to it, yes. But what I've experienced so far is that whiteboard > individual project + culture + experience + whatever else. Thus my hunch that they are not there to show something more on top of other things but rather be the most decisive factor of all.
  - username90 7y ago
    > individual project + culture + experience + whatever else That gives you the interview and determines what level you get if you get hired, so it still matters more than the white-board. White-boarding is still necessary to check that you are top x% in terms or some mishmash of skill and intelligence. Having tech leads who are less talented than our juniors would be bad, so testing that they are better in every way is important.
- asark 7y ago
  I think most of the dislike comes from the tendency of typical whiteboard questions to favor someone who happens to have seen a very similar problem recently, the same way someone who comes up with the correct answer to a brain teaser very quickly is usually someone who's seen it before. Many rely on that, in fact, since otherwise they'd be asking people to come up with a publishable (once published, perhaps) finding, under pressure, on the spot, in maybe an hour. This might be fine if the "very similar problem" is something you'd likely have encountered in your work, but often they questions are drawn from a pool that most people in this line of work see rarely if at all, and if they do it's likely to be some very small subset of the questions, so dedicated study of the remainder of the pool still puts one at a large advantage, regardless how useful it is in doing your actual work. They're measures of "how bad you want it" (how much of your time you spent memorizing stuff you don't actually use to prep for the interviews) and/or how recently you took an algorithms course. And maybe those are things worth measuring, I dunno. Maybe the absence of strong enough signals on either of those is important enough that it makes sense to use them to reject people who are otherwise very capable of doing the actual work.
zerogvt 7y ago
Added a note (*) that answers your question.

by rmah 7y ago

crimsonalucard 7y ago

A lot of programming involves design and structure. Whiteboard interviews are biased towards algorithms involving problems that are typically trivial solved with library functions like sort. A whiteboard interviewer typically finds some type of "library" problem, gives it a little twist and throws it at a senior programmer who's been doing design and structure for years. The candidate out of school, meanwhile, recently took an algorithms course. So for the older candidate to keep up with the younger one the older one actually has to go and study stuff UNRELATED to work. I find it strange that you can be older than the Parent poster but not realize this fact.

pdpi 7y ago
Depends a lot on the places you're interviewing at. The places that are bad at interviewing have the exact problems you're describing. Better places test for more real-world skills. The best places tailor the questions to the expected seniority of the candidate. If the GP has had some amount of luck and/or skill with picking the places they interview at, they might not have experienced this too much.

shubb 7y ago

I think when he says 'white board interview', he means 'algorithms and data structures screen, which may or may not be on a whiteboard'. So, for instance, you could give a data science applicant a dataset and pandas and tell them to make you a report 'about sales projections' then see what they come back with. Or you could ask them to sort a list of strings in log(n) time and n space using a recursive solution. The first test would probably benifit an experieced applicant because hopefully they will have a better understanding of what buisness actually needs. The second test would benifit a recent graduate, because they will have done algorithms 101 more recently and remember a canned solution. Of course, experienced applicants will revise this sort of problem and play on hacker rank for a couple months before a job hunt, so it will also benifit candidates who are actively job hunting, rather than applying for a specific oppertunity

01100011 7y ago

Same here, but that's only because I practiced. WB coding is a skill like any other, barring a physical issue which prevents you from writing on the WB. I do sympathize though. The older I get, the slower I tend to think and the more silly mistakes I make. WBC is not a good way to show off my skills. Frankly I think WBC in general is biased towards the type of rote learners who grind through leetcode problems and know how to regurgitate canned answers, but that is dependent on your interviewer.

zerogvt 7y ago
It is strongly advised that if you get a question you've already practiced then you should tell your interviewers. At least that's the supposed code of conduct. So, what you're suggesting is that the code of conduct is just words and this is all just a set of moves that we have to go through.
- asark 7y ago
  What code of conduct? Who advises that? Expecting that to be followed seems like it would just disadvantage honest hard studiers and honest people who actually do figure out the solution on the spot, while rewarding dishonest talented performers who also happen to be hard studiers—so unless that's what you're trying to select for....
  - zerogvt 7y ago
    It's in the bible for the WB religion http://www.crackingthecodinginterview.com/ http://www.crackingthecodinginterview.com/ See - I've even gone through that. I'm that diligent.
    - asark 7y ago
      Hahaha, touché. I either missed or forgot that bit. Guess I fail the test :-)
mreome 7y ago
I think "WB coding is a skill like any other" is exactly the point. It's a skill that does not really apply to the day-to-day work of most programmers though, so using WB coding as a criterion favors those who have the time to hone it, or are recent grads (the exams in many CS courses get quite close to white board programming). It's unclear that it's a direct proxy for age, but it's easy to see that many more senior programmers would have neither the time no recent academic experience to have that particular skill well-practiced.

ryanisnan 7y ago

I agree. What would age have to do with recalling syntactic idiosyncrasies, or being able to theorize about problems with a dry-erase marker and a whiteboard (or a pen and pencil, or a keyboard and a computer)? Reading between the lines, you seem upset about having to answer questions about technical problems you perceive to be irrelevant, and that these technical problems are more likely to be solved successfully by those who have recently practiced them (e.g. graduates). I too agree that, while abstract technical interview questions have little bearing on most day-to-day work, they do some things quite well: 1 - Define a well-bounded problem of sufficient difficulty 2 - Give the interviewee a good baseline for objective success 3 - Exercise a person's mind to think about complicated problems While they are contrived and not entirely representative of daily work, they are not without value.

zerogvt 7y ago
There is some value to it, yes. But what I've experienced so far is that whiteboard > individual project + culture + experience + whatever else. Thus my hunch that they are not there to show something more on top of other things but rather be the most decisive factor of all.
- username90 7y ago
  > individual project + culture + experience + whatever else That gives you the interview and determines what level you get if you get hired, so it still matters more than the white-board. White-boarding is still necessary to check that you are top x% in terms or some mishmash of skill and intelligence. Having tech leads who are less talented than our juniors would be bad, so testing that they are better in every way is important.
asark 7y ago
I think most of the dislike comes from the tendency of typical whiteboard questions to favor someone who happens to have seen a very similar problem recently, the same way someone who comes up with the correct answer to a brain teaser very quickly is usually someone who's seen it before. Many rely on that, in fact, since otherwise they'd be asking people to come up with a publishable (once published, perhaps) finding, under pressure, on the spot, in maybe an hour. This might be fine if the "very similar problem" is something you'd likely have encountered in your work, but often they questions are drawn from a pool that most people in this line of work see rarely if at all, and if they do it's likely to be some very small subset of the questions, so dedicated study of the remainder of the pool still puts one at a large advantage, regardless how useful it is in doing your actual work. They're measures of "how bad you want it" (how much of your time you spent memorizing stuff you don't actually use to prep for the interviews) and/or how recently you took an algorithms course. And maybe those are things worth measuring, I dunno. Maybe the absence of strong enough signals on either of those is important enough that it makes sense to use them to reject people who are otherwise very capable of doing the actual work.

zerogvt 7y ago

Added a note (*) that answers your question.