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You must be pretty good at whiteboard interviews. I can pick up new technologies quickly and I am a good developer (at least my manager says so) but I can neve

You must be pretty good at whiteboard interviews. I can pick up new technologies quickly and I am a good developer (at least my manager says so) but I can never come up with elegant solutions like this to what I call a whiteboard problem. This is the exact reason why I fail at those whiteboard interviews. Any suggestions for me?

piva00 6y ago
The only suggestion I have is practice, it's a skill like many others where practice makes you aware of patterns and these patterns have common or known approaches. Of course just blindly applying patterns won't cut it, the practice part is that the common ones become ingrained and you can focus your mental effort into the specifics of a new problem. Rehearsing your knowledge of data structures and algorithms while studying algorithmic quizzes can get you pretty far, it's time-consuming though so it needs to be something you get fun out of it, I don't get much fun out of it so I have done the bare minimum that is needed for this industry...
adwn 6y ago
> You must be pretty good at whiteboard interviews. I never had a single whiteboard interview in my life, so I can't give you advice on how to get better at them, sorry. Back in university, I had a "Design and Analysis of Algorithms" course, and one of the first (toy) exercises was to implement a queue using other data structures. This solution with two stacks was what I came up with. That's 12 years ago now, good times :-)
jxcl 6y ago
Maybe it's a whiteboard problem, but I would just call it a puzzle. Puzzle solving requires creativity. Picking up new technologies doesn't require creativity. Being a good developer (these days) also doesn't require much creativity, especially if you're just implementing spec and not designing systems. The best way to get better at puzzles is to practice puzzles! The reason I don't want to call these problems whiteboard problems is because it implies that they're only used in that context. These types of puzzles can be done for fun, too! Perhaps you start with simpler puzzles and try some simple solutions. You might solve a few. You'll try some harder puzzles and you'll get frustrated because the solution doesn't come immediately. Sometimes you'll combine two solutions you've used previously to solve something more complex. It's an amazing feeling! If you want a book of math puzzles, I recommend "Measurement" by Paul Lockhart. He explains and helps you explore math in the way he thinks it should be taught in schools, and I agree with him. If you want something more programming focused, take a look at "Programming Pearls" by Jon Bentley. It's a very old book, so the constraints he has to work with are quaint by today's standards (do something without using more than a megabyte of RAM. Hah!), but they're good puzzles as far as I remember. Good luck! Edit to add: The most useful thing you'll get from spending time with puzzles from a certain field is the intuition about which tools to reach for and which to forget about. You'll still likely have to try for a bunch of tools before you find the ones that work the best (or at all), but you'll get better at choosing ones that are more likely to work sooner, so you'll be able to progress faster on harder puzzles. As Greg LeMond said about cycling: ‘[It] never gets any easier, you just go faster’ :)
- anthropodie 6y ago
  Thank for those recommendations!

piva00 6y ago

The only suggestion I have is practice, it's a skill like many others where practice makes you aware of patterns and these patterns have common or known approaches. Of course just blindly applying patterns won't cut it, the practice part is that the common ones become ingrained and you can focus your mental effort into the specifics of a new problem. Rehearsing your knowledge of data structures and algorithms while studying algorithmic quizzes can get you pretty far, it's time-consuming though so it needs to be something you get fun out of it, I don't get much fun out of it so I have done the bare minimum that is needed for this industry...

adwn 6y ago

> You must be pretty good at whiteboard interviews. I never had a single whiteboard interview in my life, so I can't give you advice on how to get better at them, sorry. Back in university, I had a "Design and Analysis of Algorithms" course, and one of the first (toy) exercises was to implement a queue using other data structures. This solution with two stacks was what I came up with. That's 12 years ago now, good times :-)

jxcl 6y ago

Maybe it's a whiteboard problem, but I would just call it a puzzle. Puzzle solving requires creativity. Picking up new technologies doesn't require creativity. Being a good developer (these days) also doesn't require much creativity, especially if you're just implementing spec and not designing systems. The best way to get better at puzzles is to practice puzzles! The reason I don't want to call these problems whiteboard problems is because it implies that they're only used in that context. These types of puzzles can be done for fun, too! Perhaps you start with simpler puzzles and try some simple solutions. You might solve a few. You'll try some harder puzzles and you'll get frustrated because the solution doesn't come immediately. Sometimes you'll combine two solutions you've used previously to solve something more complex. It's an amazing feeling! If you want a book of math puzzles, I recommend "Measurement" by Paul Lockhart. He explains and helps you explore math in the way he thinks it should be taught in schools, and I agree with him. If you want something more programming focused, take a look at "Programming Pearls" by Jon Bentley. It's a very old book, so the constraints he has to work with are quaint by today's standards (do something without using more than a megabyte of RAM. Hah!), but they're good puzzles as far as I remember. Good luck! Edit to add: The most useful thing you'll get from spending time with puzzles from a certain field is the intuition about which tools to reach for and which to forget about. You'll still likely have to try for a bunch of tools before you find the ones that work the best (or at all), but you'll get better at choosing ones that are more likely to work sooner, so you'll be able to progress faster on harder puzzles. As Greg LeMond said about cycling: ‘[It] never gets any easier, you just go faster’ :)

anthropodie 6y ago
Thank for those recommendations!