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This. I myself flat out told recruiters I don't do whiteboard coding. If the interview requires that, don't bother putting me up. I'm more than happy to answ

This. I myself flat out told recruiters I don't do whiteboard coding. If the interview requires that, don't bother putting me up. I'm more than happy to answer architecture questions, deep dive on what I've done, look at my github. However, I refuse to stand there and whiteboard algorithms for employers. I'm not good at coding when people stare at me, so I'm not going to. In turn, I don't do that to candidates. Having a technical dialog is great. You can easily sort of the pretenders and get a real good sense if they are a good team player, which ranks almost as highly as technical chops.

kjeetgill 6y ago
This is really interesting. If it's not prying too personally, mind sharing where you're at or some example companies? I've interviewed at maybe 15-20 companies over the years and never not had to whiteboard or live code in some way. The thought of not having to seems so foreign to me.
- snapetom 6y ago
  I feel like whiteboarding has only gotten popular in the last 10 years, maybe less. I've been at six companies in that span, interviewing at probably 12-14 total. Out of the six, four have been tech startups including the one I am in now. The industries have been cybersecurity (x2), online retail, and online marketing. The two non-startups have been in education and healthcare. 2016 was the last time I didn't have the luxury of looking while jobless, but I was still pretty picky. I already knew I didn't like white boarding, so I started to warn recruiters that I wasn't good at it. Two early interviews, I told recruiters this, and they both urged me to go to their interviews anyway. I went ahead thinking it would be good practice. Not surprisingly, I wasn't offered because I just wasn't that interested, and it showed in the interviews. I remember getting a bit curt in one interview because the last person that I interviewed with (going on 4 hours), asked me the same coding question as the first person. After that experience, I became more inflexible on my no-coding interview requirements. It probably was just dumb luck, but this wasn't a problem, I was told. Two more companies after that were at companies that did architecture interviews centered around data platforms, and I eventually took one offer.
  - collyw 6y ago
    Whiteboard has actually become less common in the last ten years in my opinion (20 years in the industry). It's moved towards take home exercises, which are a more realistic gauge of what you are doing, but are just such a time sink. They take a minimum of half a day, and then you are pushing out fairly rushed code, so not the best.
    - anonyxyz 6y ago
      Half day long take home exercise are a huge red flag and disrespectful of the candidates time. Ours takes at most 1 hr.
      - collyw 6y ago
        That's very reasonable. Everyone wants a miniature throwaway app, including project setup and test usually. Then you get a problem when one library you wanted to use doesn't install easily, or you have some random problem that takes an hour to debug. Last time I got failed on a number of things many of which weren't asked for. Linting failed on two whitespaces, as I didn't have pylint set up on my home machine. I should have returned json, rather than html, despite the task asking for a 'page, no need for styling'. And I didn't provide a setup.py, despite it not being asked for. I provided the most difficult integration test to implement, but they complained I didn't add more unit tests, even though they has said to describe what tests you would have implemented if you were short on time, which I did.

kjeetgill 6y ago

This is really interesting. If it's not prying too personally, mind sharing where you're at or some example companies? I've interviewed at maybe 15-20 companies over the years and never not had to whiteboard or live code in some way. The thought of not having to seems so foreign to me.

snapetom 6y ago
I feel like whiteboarding has only gotten popular in the last 10 years, maybe less. I've been at six companies in that span, interviewing at probably 12-14 total. Out of the six, four have been tech startups including the one I am in now. The industries have been cybersecurity (x2), online retail, and online marketing. The two non-startups have been in education and healthcare. 2016 was the last time I didn't have the luxury of looking while jobless, but I was still pretty picky. I already knew I didn't like white boarding, so I started to warn recruiters that I wasn't good at it. Two early interviews, I told recruiters this, and they both urged me to go to their interviews anyway. I went ahead thinking it would be good practice. Not surprisingly, I wasn't offered because I just wasn't that interested, and it showed in the interviews. I remember getting a bit curt in one interview because the last person that I interviewed with (going on 4 hours), asked me the same coding question as the first person. After that experience, I became more inflexible on my no-coding interview requirements. It probably was just dumb luck, but this wasn't a problem, I was told. Two more companies after that were at companies that did architecture interviews centered around data platforms, and I eventually took one offer.
- collyw 6y ago
  Whiteboard has actually become less common in the last ten years in my opinion (20 years in the industry). It's moved towards take home exercises, which are a more realistic gauge of what you are doing, but are just such a time sink. They take a minimum of half a day, and then you are pushing out fairly rushed code, so not the best.
  - anonyxyz 6y ago
    Half day long take home exercise are a huge red flag and disrespectful of the candidates time. Ours takes at most 1 hr.
    - collyw 6y ago
      That's very reasonable. Everyone wants a miniature throwaway app, including project setup and test usually. Then you get a problem when one library you wanted to use doesn't install easily, or you have some random problem that takes an hour to debug. Last time I got failed on a number of things many of which weren't asked for. Linting failed on two whitespaces, as I didn't have pylint set up on my home machine. I should have returned json, rather than html, despite the task asking for a 'page, no need for styling'. And I didn't provide a setup.py, despite it not being asked for. I provided the most difficult integration test to implement, but they complained I didn't add more unit tests, even though they has said to describe what tests you would have implemented if you were short on time, which I did.