4 ms·

Oh God, here we go again. Coding on a whiteboard in an interview is not "broken". What is "broken" however is making the problem the candidate needs to solve "

by cletus 6y ago

Oh God, here we go again. Coding on a whiteboard in an interview is not "broken". What is "broken" however is making the problem the candidate needs to solve "hard". I can't stress this enough: a whiteboard coding test is nothing more than a negative filter. It's to filter out people who can't turn a simple idea into code as these people exist. This is why FizzBuzz was such a simple problem. But interviewers fall into the trap of thinking "this problem is too easy" and make it hard (eg figuring out a problem is g union-find on the spot and then implementing it) or, worse, they make it a crap shoot of whether you know the "trick" or not (eg reversing bits in O(log n) or the tortoise and the hare). This actually makes the test completely useless. A negative filter is simply a filter whereby if you fail it, you almost certainly aren't a great hire but the reverse doesn't apply: there should be no A+ on a whiteboard coding test. It's straight pass/fail and an easy pass at that. I realize some people have anxiety about doing this. Having helped or coached a bunch of people in the past about this, I can say that mock interviews and practice help the vast majority of these people. Some may be helped by doing this on a laptop in a shared doc instead, which is fine. A few will struggle with the anxiety of that, even with coaching and practice. While I feel bad for those people, I do wonder if a reasonable-sized organization, which will generally require a certain level of communication skills and presentation ability, is the right place for you.

yelloweyes 6y ago
>which will generally require a certain level of communication skills and presentation ability, is the right place for you. It's really not about presentation ability. It's "oh shit I have x minutes to do this and I have to get it right or I won't get the job, oh shit 5 minutes passed already and I haven't done anything" type of anxiety.
- cletus 6y ago
  And you can't imagine that same person having this mental dialogue? "Oh shit, I have to get up and talk about my project. What am I going to say? What if my director thinks I'm an idiot? What if they ask me a hard question? What if I can't answer the question? Will they cancel my project? Will they bring in someone to rescue me? Will I get fired?"
pfooti 6y ago
I agree with this. I work at a FAANG that does whiteboard coding interviews (opinions my own, etc etc). When I interview people, I give pretty straightforward questions. My goal is not to run some algorithm guessing game. If I'm interviewing for a senior FE position, I make sure they know enough about async patterns in JavaScript that I feel confident that they could build an event handler without dropping promises on the floor. A back end position? Can they use (not implement, just use) a hashmap efficiently and do they think about boundary conditions in input sets (you'd be surprised how many people ignore punctuation when breaking sentences into words - they just do a split(' ') and call it a day. This is really basic stuff. I'm always able to (a) filter out people who just need more time learning to code (or are too nervous to perform well, which is still a problem with even these whiteboard activities) and (b) prompt a discussion about engineering practices. My criterion is simple: do I think I could see this person submitting code to my project without me needing to constantly fix what they write? It isn't about memorizing algos or anything. Aaalso: I didn't study leetcode, and managed to get my job just fine. I know there's a reputation of the process being just algos, and I'm sure a lot of the interviews are. But not all of them, even at the FAANG.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  It'd be interesting if you know about any similar hard/easy level questions on the web Id take a look :-)
aclatuts 6y ago
This is also a fair point. I usually do bad on white board coding. But I really enjoyed a white board interview that only tested my knowledge of javascript. The problem didn't require 3 paragraphs of explanation and examples. The interview involved a series of 1-2 sentence requirements that built on top of each other.
csunbird 6y ago
I interviewed a FAANG company and made to the whiteboard interview. The interviewer asked me to implement an algorithm to extract words from arbitrarily long string, which do not include any separators, using a dictionary, within 30 minutes and a code that compiles into $PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE on the spot. Pseudo-code is not allowed. Yeah, I tanked the interview but I really did not care if I pass when I got to that point.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  If not required to write code that compiled, then, how would you have liked that?

by cletus 6y ago

yelloweyes 6y ago

>which will generally require a certain level of communication skills and presentation ability, is the right place for you. It's really not about presentation ability. It's "oh shit I have x minutes to do this and I have to get it right or I won't get the job, oh shit 5 minutes passed already and I haven't done anything" type of anxiety.

cletus 6y ago
And you can't imagine that same person having this mental dialogue? "Oh shit, I have to get up and talk about my project. What am I going to say? What if my director thinks I'm an idiot? What if they ask me a hard question? What if I can't answer the question? Will they cancel my project? Will they bring in someone to rescue me? Will I get fired?"

pfooti 6y ago

I agree with this. I work at a FAANG that does whiteboard coding interviews (opinions my own, etc etc). When I interview people, I give pretty straightforward questions. My goal is not to run some algorithm guessing game. If I'm interviewing for a senior FE position, I make sure they know enough about async patterns in JavaScript that I feel confident that they could build an event handler without dropping promises on the floor. A back end position? Can they use (not implement, just use) a hashmap efficiently and do they think about boundary conditions in input sets (you'd be surprised how many people ignore punctuation when breaking sentences into words - they just do a split(' ') and call it a day. This is really basic stuff. I'm always able to (a) filter out people who just need more time learning to code (or are too nervous to perform well, which is still a problem with even these whiteboard activities) and (b) prompt a discussion about engineering practices. My criterion is simple: do I think I could see this person submitting code to my project without me needing to constantly fix what they write? It isn't about memorizing algos or anything. Aaalso: I didn't study leetcode, and managed to get my job just fine. I know there's a reputation of the process being just algos, and I'm sure a lot of the interviews are. But not all of them, even at the FAANG.

cutemonster 6y ago
It'd be interesting if you know about any similar hard/easy level questions on the web Id take a look :-)

aclatuts 6y ago

This is also a fair point. I usually do bad on white board coding. But I really enjoyed a white board interview that only tested my knowledge of javascript. The problem didn't require 3 paragraphs of explanation and examples. The interview involved a series of 1-2 sentence requirements that built on top of each other.

csunbird 6y ago

I interviewed a FAANG company and made to the whiteboard interview. The interviewer asked me to implement an algorithm to extract words from arbitrarily long string, which do not include any separators, using a dictionary, within 30 minutes and a code that compiles into $PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE on the spot. Pseudo-code is not allowed. Yeah, I tanked the interview but I really did not care if I pass when I got to that point.

cutemonster 6y ago
If not required to write code that compiled, then, how would you have liked that?