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As someone who has interviewed dozens of candidates in the past few months, I try not to frame it as a performance by the candidate, but rather as a series of p
by skohan 6y ago
As someone who has interviewed dozens of candidates in the past few months, I try not to frame it as a performance by the candidate, but rather as a series of professional conversations with a potential colleague.
In this context, a white-board interview would normally come later in the process, when we already have a rapport with the candidate, and the goal would not be to "catch" a candidate with tricky questions, but rather to see how well a candidate is able to reason through a problem collaboratively in real time, which is something I would expect to happen in the team setting with some regularity. It's even more of a team chemistry evaluation as a problem solving test.
Probably earlier in the process I would ask a candidate to complete an individual assignment in their own time. This would be the opportunity to see what kind of work they are capable of producing.
- kerkeslager 6y ago> In this context, a white-board interview would normally come later in the process, when we already have a rapport with the candidate, and the goal would not be to "catch" a candidate with tricky questions, but rather to see how well a candidate is able to reason through a problem collaboratively in real time, which is something I would expect to happen in the team setting with some regularity. It's even more of a team chemistry evaluation as a problem solving test. If your goal is to see how they reason through a problem collaboratively, then doesn't it make sense to actually collaborate with them? I.e. instead of asking questions, take a problem that you don't know the answer to either, and team up on it. When I'm solving a problem I sometimes do use a whiteboard, but that depends on the nature of the problem--if it's heavily data structure oriented, for example, then a whiteboard is useful for drawing out the data structures. I don't think I've ever written a line of code or pseudocode on a whiteboard board as part of collaborative problem solving: that's just not useful when you could be writing actual code on a shared screen. TL;DR: While I agree with your goals here, I don't think the method we're discussing actually achieves those goals.
- skohan 6y agoI would approach a whiteboard interview collaboratively. Generally I would leave it up to the candidate to drive the problem solving in this case, but I would expect them to ask questions and get input rather than just sit back and let them sweat. If they were going down the wrong track I might also ask questions to nudge them in the right direction. Seeing how they engage in this kind of process would be precisely what I want to understand.