4 ms·
Nobody likes whiteboarding Honestly, I really like whiteboarding. I liked doing programming contests too, which are like whiteboarding except harder and you sp
by lacker 7y ago
Nobody likes whiteboarding
Honestly, I really like whiteboarding. I liked doing programming contests too, which are like whiteboarding except harder and you spend more time at them. There are times when I have gotten together with other like-minded software engineers and given each other whiteboard programming problems for fun. (Also to test whether problems are good interview problems.)
A lot of people like whiteboarding problems and like interviewing with whiteboarding problems. Those are usually also the people who pass whiteboarding interviews. Just because there are a lot of complaints about them, don't assume that represents everyone.
- cwp 7y agoI like whiteboarding too. It's stupid to expect people to write syntactically correct code on a whiteboard, but totally reasonably to use it to discuss a problem. I mean, that's why we have whiteboards in our offices in the first place, right?
- mercutio2 7y agoPeople who participated in ACM competitions is my (now no longer secret) secret weapon when forced to filter thousands of resumes. It’s probably the most strongly correlated with liking and being able to do the job signal I’ve ever seen.
- codeisawesome 7y agoWould you say the same about Google CodeJam? Some people didn’t have the chance to go to college...
- mercutio2 7y agoProbably not, no. First, you’re not going to get your resume in front of me without a college degree, CS degree or equivalent experience is a bar that recruiters apply well before I’m involved. But as far as I can tell, Google CodeJam is an individual sport (I may be mistaken about that, but Google’s page won’t load in my browser, so I could only read the Wikipedia page about it). The key thing about the ACM contest is it requires BOTH effective cooperation with a teammate AND the desire to solve programming puzzles. Now, just to be clear, I’ve fired people who passed this bar; being a smart puzzle solver who’s social enough to collaborate is a great start, but it turns out lots of people just aren’t interested in shipping software. I still think ACM team participation is a strong signal, it just doesn’t cover the fact that being an adult means 90% of every job is boring, and not everyone is ready to do the boring stuff when they’re fresh out of college.
- codeisawesome 7y agoThat’s interesting info, thanks.
- wdroz 7y agoDiscussions about this in HN in 2015 [0]. [0] -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9324209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9324209