4 ms·

I totally understand your philosophy and you make some great suggestions, but overall there's one big flaw with whiteboard interviews: Artificial Pressure and i

I totally understand your philosophy and you make some great suggestions, but overall there's one big flaw with whiteboard interviews: Artificial Pressure and its impact on people's ability to think clearly on the spot. I am a very methodical thinker which is why I tend to prefer work in large scale ore high-performance systems where you consider the implications of thread contention and so forth. I've designed and built multiple large scale production systems and i've also simultaneously forgotten whether it should be += or =+ during a whiteboard interview because of a phenomenon I can't quite describe. Obviously I was laughed at for someone who's actually had 10 years experience with c++ to forget something so basic but it happens when you are on the spot. The biggest problem with whiteboards is that they reward exactly what they say they try to weed out, rote memorization. It's no secret you could spend weeks practicing on leetcode for an interview but those skills simply don't translate to real-world programming. Algorithm design is maybe 2% of software engineering. The vast majority is knowing what pieces of technology are out there in order to avoid reinventing the wheel all the time. Whiteboards don't test that skill. It tests a marathon runner on their 100 meter dash time.

abalone 7y ago
> Obviously I was laughed at for someone who's actually had 10 years experience with c++ to forget something so basic but it happens when you are on the spot. This 100% happened to me (apart from being laughed at) only it was even more of a meltdown. Also 10 years experience and a problem I could do in my sleep. It was my first interview after a long time and it triggered performance anxiety and nervousness. The solution is you need to practice live interviews, not just leetcode solo.
- levythe 7y ago
  If the system is so poorly evaluating people that they have to train an irrelevant set of skills to succeed in it, what does that say about the system?
  - blackflame7000 7y ago
    I am a big fan of the take-home problem. For example, Symantec once asked applicants to design a simple virus detector with wildcards (similar to grep) and then they gave interview spots to people with the best performance. During the actual interview, however, there wasn't much whiteboard coding only designing or "how would you do X" sort of questions.
    - levythe 7y ago
      There's a small list of companies I'd do a, "Take home test," for. In my experience, most companies that ask for it are looking for free labor.
      - crummy 7y ago
        I've never done a take home test that produced anything that could have been vaguely useful for the interviewing company. Usually the problems are pretty artificial.
        mjfisher 7y ago
        They absolutely should be artificial problems. If they're not carefully designed to test what the hiring company cares about, it's a bad test
      - blackflame7000 7y ago
        Well if they are good enough for you to put their code into your program then shouldn't they be good enough to be offered a job? Seems like it works exactly as intended in terms of trying to find someone who can do the job
        levythe 7y ago
        I've had multiple take home tests result in changes to the products that company offers. I've never received a job offer from those companies. Maybe your experience differs, but I've had a sour taste left by such practice.
- blackflame7000 7y ago
  I knew when the interviewer pulled out his phone to snap a picture of only that part of the whiteboard that I didn’t get the job lol
xvector 7y ago
Whiteboard interviews exist because without them companies wouldn't have a metric to artificially restrict hiring. Passing a whiteboard interview makes both the company and interviewee feel special and maintains the bubble of software engineering salaries.
- lliamander 7y ago
  Companies don't care about artificially restricting hiring: they want developers to be as cheap as possible. The truth is, software engineering really quite hard, but that whiteboard interviews just happen to be a rather poor way of evaluating candidates. A work sample test, structured interview, or IQ test (alone or in combination) would be a much better filtering process.
  - abalone 7y ago
    > A work sample test, structured interview, or IQ test (alone or in combination) would be a much better filtering process. I'm not sure what any of these mean in concrete terms. Is an IQ test like those "why are manhole covers round" Microsoft questions of yore? Yuck. Is a work sample a homework test? That takes more time for both parties. It's not a good substitute for a 1 hour first round screen. And what's a "structured" interview??
    - james_s_tayler 7y ago
      You should probably look up what an IQ test involves instead of just guessingly blindly, getting it wrong and then writing off the suggestion based on a wrong assumption.
      - xvector 7y ago
        Is stratifying income based off of IQ any more than we already have something that would benefit society?
        lliamander 7y ago

abalone 7y ago

> Obviously I was laughed at for someone who's actually had 10 years experience with c++ to forget something so basic but it happens when you are on the spot. This 100% happened to me (apart from being laughed at) only it was even more of a meltdown. Also 10 years experience and a problem I could do in my sleep. It was my first interview after a long time and it triggered performance anxiety and nervousness. The solution is you need to practice live interviews, not just leetcode solo.

levythe 7y ago
If the system is so poorly evaluating people that they have to train an irrelevant set of skills to succeed in it, what does that say about the system?
- blackflame7000 7y ago
  I am a big fan of the take-home problem. For example, Symantec once asked applicants to design a simple virus detector with wildcards (similar to grep) and then they gave interview spots to people with the best performance. During the actual interview, however, there wasn't much whiteboard coding only designing or "how would you do X" sort of questions.
  - levythe 7y ago
    There's a small list of companies I'd do a, "Take home test," for. In my experience, most companies that ask for it are looking for free labor.
    - crummy 7y ago
      I've never done a take home test that produced anything that could have been vaguely useful for the interviewing company. Usually the problems are pretty artificial.
      - mjfisher 7y ago
        They absolutely should be artificial problems. If they're not carefully designed to test what the hiring company cares about, it's a bad test
    - blackflame7000 7y ago
      Well if they are good enough for you to put their code into your program then shouldn't they be good enough to be offered a job? Seems like it works exactly as intended in terms of trying to find someone who can do the job
      - levythe 7y ago
        I've had multiple take home tests result in changes to the products that company offers. I've never received a job offer from those companies. Maybe your experience differs, but I've had a sour taste left by such practice.
blackflame7000 7y ago
I knew when the interviewer pulled out his phone to snap a picture of only that part of the whiteboard that I didn’t get the job lol

xvector 7y ago

Whiteboard interviews exist because without them companies wouldn't have a metric to artificially restrict hiring. Passing a whiteboard interview makes both the company and interviewee feel special and maintains the bubble of software engineering salaries.

lliamander 7y ago
Companies don't care about artificially restricting hiring: they want developers to be as cheap as possible. The truth is, software engineering really quite hard, but that whiteboard interviews just happen to be a rather poor way of evaluating candidates. A work sample test, structured interview, or IQ test (alone or in combination) would be a much better filtering process.
- abalone 7y ago
  > A work sample test, structured interview, or IQ test (alone or in combination) would be a much better filtering process. I'm not sure what any of these mean in concrete terms. Is an IQ test like those "why are manhole covers round" Microsoft questions of yore? Yuck. Is a work sample a homework test? That takes more time for both parties. It's not a good substitute for a 1 hour first round screen. And what's a "structured" interview??
  - james_s_tayler 7y ago
    You should probably look up what an IQ test involves instead of just guessingly blindly, getting it wrong and then writing off the suggestion based on a wrong assumption.
    - xvector 7y ago
      Is stratifying income based off of IQ any more than we already have something that would benefit society?
      - lliamander 7y ago