15 ms·

My least favourite interview technique has to be "talk me through a complex problem on a whiteboard". It's not so much the stress but the fact that you can't ha

My least favourite interview technique has to be "talk me through a complex problem on a whiteboard". It's not so much the stress but the fact that you can't have a train of thought longer than 5 seconds before someone finds the silence awkward or interprets it as you're lost and breaks the silence and train of thought. It's a test for solving complex problems in 5 second blocks while being constantly interrupted.

Germanika 6y ago
Working through a problem out loud is definitely a bit of a different skill from just solving a complex problem on your own. I do find that saying something along the lines of "OK now I just need a minute to think through this next part" goes over well enough and can give you a minute to relax and think though.
- planet-and-halo 6y ago
  I think the issue is "a minute." You still feel pressured to get moving and keep talking, even if it buys you a little time. My favorite part of the job is whiteboarding with colleagues, but in an interview there is something that feels inherently adversarial about it. This isn't necessarily the fault of the interviewer either, it's just sort of baked into the format. There's a natural power discrepancy: the interviewer makes the final call, and they selected the problem to begin with, which means you can't possibly be on equal footing. That imbalance means you spend the whole time on the back foot. I'm not sure there's a better format available, but that's definitely an unnatural environment and can lead people including me to perform much differently than they do in a normal work environment. Unfortunately it may be the best we can do.
  - bmitc 6y ago
    I think the better format is to have the interviewee talk through a complex problem that they have already solved, whether it's a side project, a work project they can talk about, or whatever. It balances out the power imbalance, and it showcases how well the interviewee can explain and talk through problems, design decisions, what they learned, what worked, what didn't, etc. through a problem they are already familiar with. These whiteboarding interviews where the interviewers pose some random question does nothing for either party.
    - planet-and-halo 6y ago
      I really like that approach. The tradeoff is that you're asking someone to spend a non-trivial amount of personal time prepping and it opens the door a bit more to BS'ing and just memorizing Stackoverflow or whatever. But presumably your interviewers are skilled enough to sniff that out. I personally feel that would be a better way to showcase my abilities.
tchalla 6y ago
> My least favourite interview technique has to be "talk me through a complex problem on a whiteboard". Let's say an interviewer reads your resume and is interested in a project. The interviewer comes to the interview prepared with some questions. They ask you to start with a high level summary of the project. Then, ask you - "What choices did you have to make during the project?". Then, ask you some specific questions about these choices. In each of these questions, the interviewer is not supposed to "evaluate your answer" but rather gain an understanding of your project and choices to be made. At the end of the interview, the interviewer would walk away with two things - (1) a clear picture of the project almost as good as the interviewee and (2) a clear picture of the design decisions the interviewee made (options they had and why they chose one over the other). The above interview is a conversation and you are allowed to be silent. The process will be communicated to you upfront. In fact, silence is encouraged because the interviewer would much rather give you time to think over a spur of the moment answer.
- majormajor 6y ago
  I would love, as an interviewer, to be able to do this style of interview every time. It's astonishing how often you get nothing useful as an answer. Things like "my boss suggested it" as the reason for choices being made, or "not really" when asked about alternatives considered, or problems they ran into... The hypothetical project whiteboard interview gives people who haven't done sufficiently interesting past projects and opportunity to show that they can think about them, at least...
- shepardrtc 6y ago
  > Let's say an interviewer reads your resume and is interested in a project. That's not what they were talking about. The complex problem is supposed to be novel to the interviewee. > In fact, silence is encouraged because the interviewer would much rather give you time to think over a spur of the moment answer. Yes, they certainly say that. But for a normal person trying to figure out a novel problem, ignoring everything that's going on and sitting there silent for 30 seconds or longer while the person who single-handedly can determine whether you pass or fail - often depending on their mood - stares at you is incredibly difficult. And if their mood isn't good, they absolutely see the silence as not knowing the answer and push for you to move on. I had it happen to me on a Facebook interview. I personally can't concentrate enough to think through a difficult, multi-layered problem in that situation. It is in no way reflective of what I can do while working. Online coding tests are more than sufficient. And a discussion afterwards about said tests is sufficient to make sure there was no cheating.
heavyset_go 6y ago
My least favorite is "let's implement something that's really easy to implement if you've spent time thinking about it or working with it before", except you don't get the time to think about it and you're judged poorly for providing anything other than the "obvious" optimal solution.
- deadmutex 6y ago
  Yeah, I have encountered this myself in the past as well -- a subject matter expert that has worked in the domain for a decade and asks you about how to solve problems in their domain (while the actual position is a generalist one). Luckily, I was able to remedy this a little bit by brushing up on common system architectures used by companies that I was interviewing with.
screye 6y ago
I actually love these kinds of questions. Allows the candidate to run through the problem as a conversation instead of a binary solved/not-solved outcome. I usually preface it by saying that I will take a minute to write down a few ideas, so the silence isn't awkward. It is such a great way to engage your interviewer, while gaining a finer ability to choose the level of abstraction when you are working through a problem. I love it also because it helps those who aren't native English speakers. The ability to visually represent ideas is equally distributed across language skills. It doesn't even need to be suited for a visual thinker. It can be math, venn diagrams, graphs or even straight up code.
- eagsalazar2 6y ago
  Also terrifying and mentally paralyzing for a large percentage of devs. I'm ok with these interviews (and agree they can be fun when they go well) if you are ok with a very high rate of false negatives and being basically inhumane to that same group of people.
  - nawgz 6y ago
    Is not the inability to think on your feet in a productive way in front of others - especially stakeholders - a gigantic red flag you want to catch? Having reasonable social skills and the ability to not look like an idiot when you're on the spot are both super important to being a productive member of a business Edit: someone has just downvoted every one of my comments in this thread and not left a response, why?
    - DFHippie 6y ago
      No. It's pretty rare outside of interviews that you have to code in front of an audience. For most jobs having performance anxiety is no red flag at all.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
        If we had to categorise interviewing as a science I think it would land squarely in the social sciences. Difficult to impossible to reproduce results; practitioners with wildly different skills and biases; institutions with systemic biases; individual candidates who can vary wildly from day to day; cohorts that change over time and distance; a lay population with strong opinions. We'd be better off selecting candidates randomly, but even this only kicks the can down the he road.
bmitc 6y ago
Even worse is when you solve the problem in a way they didn't expect or plan on, and they spend the time derailing you off your solution and back to the one they understand. I had a miserable interview experience once were I gave a tree processing solution in a functional, tail recursive way. They spent the interview sliding me back into a mutable, iterative approach, and it really through me off. Additionally, I don't think they even understood the functional solution. Half the time, it felt like I was needing to guess where they'd like me to go. And we all know working and software development is nothing like that. At no point in that particular interview was I asked to describe projects I had worked on. When I left, they had no idea what I had even worked on previously because they didn't ask. They just asked a tree question, which someone could look up over an evening or weekend. So pointless.
- plutonorm 6y ago
  The scariest part of all this is that people think this is a good way to filter candidates. It shows you that the company is populated by stress tolerant, herd mentality thinkers. I see them as a cross between army grunts and high school nerds. Simple fast logic, drawn to rules and systems, prone to being swayed by appeals to authority. Low sensitivity nervous systems meaning high stress tolerance and low ability to perceive, synthesise and abstract. Working with these guys is like wearing a straight jacket anyway - avoid like the plague. Unless you happen to fit that model, in which case go right ahead, you do you, but please be aware that there are other kinds of human out there who can add value outside of the cookie cutter.
  - majormajor 6y ago
    That's an awful lot of insulting generalization you're labeling people with, simply for being able to handle stress better than you. You are also completely overlooking the people for whom stress-handling doesn't come into play because it's not a very stressful situation for them. (This set of people is interesting to me, because it seems plausible that "gets less stressed by being asked about algorithms and system design" might correlate to "has a higher skill level and finds the problems easier and simpler.") How would you evaluate a candidate's problem solving skills? "Trust me, I can do it, I just can't show you" doesn't seem particularly compelling if I'm looking to hire someone.
tomca32 6y ago
I absolutely hate the interviews that are just an algo challenge and the interviewer is waiting on me to finish to evaluate my solution. I flip out, start thinking that I'm taking too long and it just goes downhill from there. On the other hand, the questions where I can talk through a problem are by far my favorite. Every problem in our field can be talked about for days. There's just so much to discuss: - different approaches - performance considerations - perceived complexity - and a hundred tangents I could go on to In my opinion, it is the interviewer's job to get the candidate to talk. If the candidate can't speak a word out of their mouth, the interviewer failed. When I interview I just want to get you to talk...tell me stories, tell me tangents, tell me the stupid stuff, tell me the smart stuff. Tell me what kind of solutions you prefer and why? Reading your comment made me think that maybe this isn't the best approach. Maybe some people want me to shut up and just do the hard math problem on their own.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  It doesn't seem difficult to msybf ask the candidate, either by phone or email or both, what or how they'd prefer to be interviewed. Maybe interviewers could offer maybe say five methods or key topics and ask the candidate to choose at least two or three.
ericbarrett 6y ago
I've been on both ends of this exchange. I always gave candidates time to work through it without interruption when I was the interviewer. This didn't prevent the worst cases of nerves, of course, but hopefully I didn't make it unnecessarily worse. Conversely, how they treat me as I go through the process is a great way to judge the engineering culture of the org. If the interviewer feels license to cut me off, jump in, correct me on syntax as I'm still writing, or just generally sprays frustration, it's a high-confidence signal that I'll get the same treatment as a new coworker, and I have ended interviews accordingly.
jmchuster 6y ago
If you work at a company where 90% of your developer interactions are, let's go to a whiteboard and hash it out, it kind of is the most job-relevant interview question you can ask outside of writing code.
- deleted 6y ago
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jedberg 6y ago
We want you to think out loud. It's a different skillset but an important one when solving a problem in a group. You might be formulating an idea in your head, but if you say it out loud, even an incomplete or "wrong" thought might be useful to someone else in a real world situation, as it might trigger an insight for them.
- ugh123 6y ago
  Yes, it is generally a good thing to be able to communicate while you're working on a problem within a group. But rarely does someone get posed a difficult technical design question on the job and on the spot where they've had little or no opportunity to think about it ahead of time. Usually there is a ton of contextual knowledge leading up to those group discussions vs. being asked a question in an interview and then be expected to perform at that same level.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    It depends on the role. I've always worked in sysadmin/devops, so a lot of programming is under duress of an outage. Even for the "regular engineers", I need to know that they can fix a production bug in real time, or at least figure out what to roll back. And even for the non-duress situation, there are plenty of situations during normal work where a senior engineer will have to jump in and contribute to a problem they've never seen before.
  - eagsalazar2 6y ago
    Or where the stakes are so high, resulting in this level of terror and paralysis in such a high percentage of candidates. I get the goal and why it is appealing, but in the end these tactics are not useful and are inhumane.
- franklampard 6y ago
  Really? I prefer myself and my coworkers to pause and think for a few minutes if needed and come up with a coherent idea. Gibberish doesn’t really trigger any insight to me, if not distracting. Well reasoned thoughts and coherent sentences do.
plank_time 6y ago
The absolute worst is when interviewers keep interrupting the candidate. It shows a complete lack of empathy and it shows that the interviewer wants the interviewee to answer the way the interviewer thinks it should be answered. I am very mindful of this when I interview and I think it’s my job as the interviewer to strain myself to try to understand the interviewee, not the other way around. I quietly try to understand my interviewee and don’t interrupt unless there’s a real reason since I want her to think freely and not feel stressed.
deleted 6y ago
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dominotw 6y ago
Am I the only one that prefers white boarding over 8 hr "take home". I refuse to work with any company that thinks that I should invest 8 hrs in unpaid work while they invest 20 mins of their time reviewing my take home.

Germanika 6y ago

Working through a problem out loud is definitely a bit of a different skill from just solving a complex problem on your own. I do find that saying something along the lines of "OK now I just need a minute to think through this next part" goes over well enough and can give you a minute to relax and think though.

planet-and-halo 6y ago
I think the issue is "a minute." You still feel pressured to get moving and keep talking, even if it buys you a little time. My favorite part of the job is whiteboarding with colleagues, but in an interview there is something that feels inherently adversarial about it. This isn't necessarily the fault of the interviewer either, it's just sort of baked into the format. There's a natural power discrepancy: the interviewer makes the final call, and they selected the problem to begin with, which means you can't possibly be on equal footing. That imbalance means you spend the whole time on the back foot. I'm not sure there's a better format available, but that's definitely an unnatural environment and can lead people including me to perform much differently than they do in a normal work environment. Unfortunately it may be the best we can do.
- bmitc 6y ago
  I think the better format is to have the interviewee talk through a complex problem that they have already solved, whether it's a side project, a work project they can talk about, or whatever. It balances out the power imbalance, and it showcases how well the interviewee can explain and talk through problems, design decisions, what they learned, what worked, what didn't, etc. through a problem they are already familiar with. These whiteboarding interviews where the interviewers pose some random question does nothing for either party.
  - planet-and-halo 6y ago
    I really like that approach. The tradeoff is that you're asking someone to spend a non-trivial amount of personal time prepping and it opens the door a bit more to BS'ing and just memorizing Stackoverflow or whatever. But presumably your interviewers are skilled enough to sniff that out. I personally feel that would be a better way to showcase my abilities.

tchalla 6y ago

> My least favourite interview technique has to be "talk me through a complex problem on a whiteboard". Let's say an interviewer reads your resume and is interested in a project. The interviewer comes to the interview prepared with some questions. They ask you to start with a high level summary of the project. Then, ask you - "What choices did you have to make during the project?". Then, ask you some specific questions about these choices. In each of these questions, the interviewer is not supposed to "evaluate your answer" but rather gain an understanding of your project and choices to be made. At the end of the interview, the interviewer would walk away with two things - (1) a clear picture of the project almost as good as the interviewee and (2) a clear picture of the design decisions the interviewee made (options they had and why they chose one over the other). The above interview is a conversation and you are allowed to be silent. The process will be communicated to you upfront. In fact, silence is encouraged because the interviewer would much rather give you time to think over a spur of the moment answer.

majormajor 6y ago
I would love, as an interviewer, to be able to do this style of interview every time. It's astonishing how often you get nothing useful as an answer. Things like "my boss suggested it" as the reason for choices being made, or "not really" when asked about alternatives considered, or problems they ran into... The hypothetical project whiteboard interview gives people who haven't done sufficiently interesting past projects and opportunity to show that they can think about them, at least...
shepardrtc 6y ago
> Let's say an interviewer reads your resume and is interested in a project. That's not what they were talking about. The complex problem is supposed to be novel to the interviewee. > In fact, silence is encouraged because the interviewer would much rather give you time to think over a spur of the moment answer. Yes, they certainly say that. But for a normal person trying to figure out a novel problem, ignoring everything that's going on and sitting there silent for 30 seconds or longer while the person who single-handedly can determine whether you pass or fail - often depending on their mood - stares at you is incredibly difficult. And if their mood isn't good, they absolutely see the silence as not knowing the answer and push for you to move on. I had it happen to me on a Facebook interview. I personally can't concentrate enough to think through a difficult, multi-layered problem in that situation. It is in no way reflective of what I can do while working. Online coding tests are more than sufficient. And a discussion afterwards about said tests is sufficient to make sure there was no cheating.

heavyset_go 6y ago

My least favorite is "let's implement something that's really easy to implement if you've spent time thinking about it or working with it before", except you don't get the time to think about it and you're judged poorly for providing anything other than the "obvious" optimal solution.

deadmutex 6y ago
Yeah, I have encountered this myself in the past as well -- a subject matter expert that has worked in the domain for a decade and asks you about how to solve problems in their domain (while the actual position is a generalist one). Luckily, I was able to remedy this a little bit by brushing up on common system architectures used by companies that I was interviewing with.

screye 6y ago

I actually love these kinds of questions. Allows the candidate to run through the problem as a conversation instead of a binary solved/not-solved outcome. I usually preface it by saying that I will take a minute to write down a few ideas, so the silence isn't awkward. It is such a great way to engage your interviewer, while gaining a finer ability to choose the level of abstraction when you are working through a problem. I love it also because it helps those who aren't native English speakers. The ability to visually represent ideas is equally distributed across language skills. It doesn't even need to be suited for a visual thinker. It can be math, venn diagrams, graphs or even straight up code.

eagsalazar2 6y ago
Also terrifying and mentally paralyzing for a large percentage of devs. I'm ok with these interviews (and agree they can be fun when they go well) if you are ok with a very high rate of false negatives and being basically inhumane to that same group of people.
- nawgz 6y ago
  Is not the inability to think on your feet in a productive way in front of others - especially stakeholders - a gigantic red flag you want to catch? Having reasonable social skills and the ability to not look like an idiot when you're on the spot are both super important to being a productive member of a business Edit: someone has just downvoted every one of my comments in this thread and not left a response, why?
  - DFHippie 6y ago
    No. It's pretty rare outside of interviews that you have to code in front of an audience. For most jobs having performance anxiety is no red flag at all.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
      If we had to categorise interviewing as a science I think it would land squarely in the social sciences. Difficult to impossible to reproduce results; practitioners with wildly different skills and biases; institutions with systemic biases; individual candidates who can vary wildly from day to day; cohorts that change over time and distance; a lay population with strong opinions. We'd be better off selecting candidates randomly, but even this only kicks the can down the he road.

bmitc 6y ago

Even worse is when you solve the problem in a way they didn't expect or plan on, and they spend the time derailing you off your solution and back to the one they understand. I had a miserable interview experience once were I gave a tree processing solution in a functional, tail recursive way. They spent the interview sliding me back into a mutable, iterative approach, and it really through me off. Additionally, I don't think they even understood the functional solution. Half the time, it felt like I was needing to guess where they'd like me to go. And we all know working and software development is nothing like that. At no point in that particular interview was I asked to describe projects I had worked on. When I left, they had no idea what I had even worked on previously because they didn't ask. They just asked a tree question, which someone could look up over an evening or weekend. So pointless.

plutonorm 6y ago
The scariest part of all this is that people think this is a good way to filter candidates. It shows you that the company is populated by stress tolerant, herd mentality thinkers. I see them as a cross between army grunts and high school nerds. Simple fast logic, drawn to rules and systems, prone to being swayed by appeals to authority. Low sensitivity nervous systems meaning high stress tolerance and low ability to perceive, synthesise and abstract. Working with these guys is like wearing a straight jacket anyway - avoid like the plague. Unless you happen to fit that model, in which case go right ahead, you do you, but please be aware that there are other kinds of human out there who can add value outside of the cookie cutter.
- majormajor 6y ago
  That's an awful lot of insulting generalization you're labeling people with, simply for being able to handle stress better than you. You are also completely overlooking the people for whom stress-handling doesn't come into play because it's not a very stressful situation for them. (This set of people is interesting to me, because it seems plausible that "gets less stressed by being asked about algorithms and system design" might correlate to "has a higher skill level and finds the problems easier and simpler.") How would you evaluate a candidate's problem solving skills? "Trust me, I can do it, I just can't show you" doesn't seem particularly compelling if I'm looking to hire someone.

tomca32 6y ago

I absolutely hate the interviews that are just an algo challenge and the interviewer is waiting on me to finish to evaluate my solution. I flip out, start thinking that I'm taking too long and it just goes downhill from there. On the other hand, the questions where I can talk through a problem are by far my favorite. Every problem in our field can be talked about for days. There's just so much to discuss: - different approaches - performance considerations - perceived complexity - and a hundred tangents I could go on to In my opinion, it is the interviewer's job to get the candidate to talk. If the candidate can't speak a word out of their mouth, the interviewer failed. When I interview I just want to get you to talk...tell me stories, tell me tangents, tell me the stupid stuff, tell me the smart stuff. Tell me what kind of solutions you prefer and why? Reading your comment made me think that maybe this isn't the best approach. Maybe some people want me to shut up and just do the hard math problem on their own.

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
It doesn't seem difficult to msybf ask the candidate, either by phone or email or both, what or how they'd prefer to be interviewed. Maybe interviewers could offer maybe say five methods or key topics and ask the candidate to choose at least two or three.

ericbarrett 6y ago

I've been on both ends of this exchange. I always gave candidates time to work through it without interruption when I was the interviewer. This didn't prevent the worst cases of nerves, of course, but hopefully I didn't make it unnecessarily worse. Conversely, how they treat me as I go through the process is a great way to judge the engineering culture of the org. If the interviewer feels license to cut me off, jump in, correct me on syntax as I'm still writing, or just generally sprays frustration, it's a high-confidence signal that I'll get the same treatment as a new coworker, and I have ended interviews accordingly.

jmchuster 6y ago

If you work at a company where 90% of your developer interactions are, let's go to a whiteboard and hash it out, it kind of is the most job-relevant interview question you can ask outside of writing code.

deleted 6y ago
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jedberg 6y ago

We want you to think out loud. It's a different skillset but an important one when solving a problem in a group. You might be formulating an idea in your head, but if you say it out loud, even an incomplete or "wrong" thought might be useful to someone else in a real world situation, as it might trigger an insight for them.

ugh123 6y ago
Yes, it is generally a good thing to be able to communicate while you're working on a problem within a group. But rarely does someone get posed a difficult technical design question on the job and on the spot where they've had little or no opportunity to think about it ahead of time. Usually there is a ton of contextual knowledge leading up to those group discussions vs. being asked a question in an interview and then be expected to perform at that same level.
- jedberg 6y ago
  It depends on the role. I've always worked in sysadmin/devops, so a lot of programming is under duress of an outage. Even for the "regular engineers", I need to know that they can fix a production bug in real time, or at least figure out what to roll back. And even for the non-duress situation, there are plenty of situations during normal work where a senior engineer will have to jump in and contribute to a problem they've never seen before.
- eagsalazar2 6y ago
  Or where the stakes are so high, resulting in this level of terror and paralysis in such a high percentage of candidates. I get the goal and why it is appealing, but in the end these tactics are not useful and are inhumane.
franklampard 6y ago
Really? I prefer myself and my coworkers to pause and think for a few minutes if needed and come up with a coherent idea. Gibberish doesn’t really trigger any insight to me, if not distracting. Well reasoned thoughts and coherent sentences do.

plank_time 6y ago

The absolute worst is when interviewers keep interrupting the candidate. It shows a complete lack of empathy and it shows that the interviewer wants the interviewee to answer the way the interviewer thinks it should be answered. I am very mindful of this when I interview and I think it’s my job as the interviewer to strain myself to try to understand the interviewee, not the other way around. I quietly try to understand my interviewee and don’t interrupt unless there’s a real reason since I want her to think freely and not feel stressed.

deleted 6y ago

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dominotw 6y ago

Am I the only one that prefers white boarding over 8 hr "take home". I refuse to work with any company that thinks that I should invest 8 hrs in unpaid work while they invest 20 mins of their time reviewing my take home.