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You would be thrilled, but would that get the candidate the job? A very common topic about programming is how useless are most whiteboard job interviews, as th

You would be thrilled, but would that get the candidate the job? A very common topic about programming is how useless are most whiteboard job interviews, as they challenge the interviewees on something they will never use in the job. Few things are farther away from day-to-day programming that a white-board problem, but kernel development might just be one of them. In regards to the GP story, I'm also saddened that the interviewers didn't show interest for those projects. Kernel development indicates a high aptitude for many kinds of unrelated programming jobs, but not for most of them. Especially "enterprise" jobs. For the purposes of the interview the "banal professional project" is likely the relevant one. If anything, having the senior developers show no interest is a good thing, and indicates that even if the candidate gets the job he probably won't enjoy his time at the company.

ZephyrBlu 5y ago
I think in general people severely underestimate how useful seemly unrelated experience or knowledge is. Keeping with the example of creating an OS kernel, foundational programming skills translate across everything. So kernel development shouldn't be a negative signal in regards to programming ability. In regards to kernel development itself, I think it's probably very valuable experience not because of the programming but because of the perspective the person has gained. I have no experience with kernel development, but I would hazard that you need a very different mindset and approach compared to application development. I think the perspective you gain from being forced to adopt a different mindset and approach is massively undervalued by most people because it's not immediately obvious how that experience is useful or directly applicable.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > I think in general people severely underestimate how useful seemly unrelated experience or knowledge is. I'd go as far as saying people who've never done this level of hobby work don't understand the amount and breadth of experience and knowledge one gains this way. A OS kernel or an assembler for a niche architecture aren't something you just do like another work task. It's not something you half-ass under deadline pressure by gluing together some third party libraries, StackOverflow tips and hastly skimmed documentation. Your boss would never agree to pay you for the amount of time and care that's involved in hobby projects like these. A month of such a project will teach you more about computing than a year on the job[0]. Unfortunately, this kind of experience is hard to keep track of and neatly summarize on your CV. If you tried, you'd end up with a page or three extra, and people would think you're just keyword stuffing, and doing it badly - referencing niche, unmarketable technologies, seemingly related to nothing[1]. These skills are important and very useful, but they don't look like it until you need them[1], and you're unlikely to pick them up on the job, unless there's already someone who had them before joining the company, and is now teaching others. There just isn't time. Taking care, or spending time sharpening the saw[2], is considered time not spent delivering business value. Since most software companies aren't really training their workforce much, it's kind of dumb to ignore off-work experience - after all, if your company isn't giving people time to skill up, why assume previous companies on a candidate's CV were different? -- [0] - It might not teach you how to work in a team setting, though. That's what jobs are good at. That, and teaching you what "good enough" is. [1] - Like, I wouldn't put "Event Tracing for Windows" as a qualification on my resume, even though me being familiar with it saved the company a lot of money they'd otherwise spend on people continuing to fruitlessly chase a heisenbug. [2] - Or, God forbid, writing tools for yourself.
chii 5y ago
Imagine in any other industry, where the candidate mentions irrelevant job experience, and expect that to be the criteria for acceptance into the job. For example, an actor applying for a role in a commercial might cite their side role in doing a theatrical production of hamlet for their community, but the interviewers (an advertising production agency) might only want to care how much professional experience they have shooting commercials. Sure, these experiences in "unrelated" work might show qualities that could be applied to this job. But you aint paid for your broad and wide interests in the topic - you are paid on being able to implement some work/feature that somebody else told you to do. And in fact, if you require intrinsic motivation to actually perform well, you might end up being a liability to the team, rather than an asset - after all, if the work is boring, and you lack intrinsic motivation for it, you might slack off, or over-engineer it to make the work more interesting to you. Or you might end up being a difficult person to work with for other team members because you sit so far above them intellectually.
- homie 5y ago
  The analogy here doesn't make sense. It'd be more like the actor mentioning that he doesn't have any experience doing commercial work, but he has acted in a theatrical production before (suggesting that he's adaptable and willing to do more than just one kind of acting job).
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  That's literally what happens for most business or leadership interviews. The only common thread for most of them is that they ran a company. They may know nothing about the market, the customer, the product or anything else related to the business, it may even have failed miserably, but because they have an MBA and hired a handful of people they're somehow competent for the job. How about we hold those people accountable to the same standards? Hell, most of your politicians are that way. You have dentists commenting on how pandemic response should be. For the last 4 years a failed business man con artist destroyed pretty much all he could get his hands on and he's still hailed as some sort of mythical creature. > Imagine in any other industry, where the candidate mentions irrelevant job experience, and expect that to be the criteria for acceptance into the job. Are you f'in kidding me? Either we hold the other useless part of society to the same standards we hold ourselves accountable to or we give each other a break. EDIT: and for all the ignorant folks thinking Trumps schoolyard bully rhetoric did anything but empower the CCP keep in mind that Chinas nickname for Trump is "Chuan Jian Guo". Trump the nation builder(guess who's nation they are talking about). And as much as I disliked Obama and his TPP, it was the answer to the new silk road. Trump basically handed China the entirety of Asias future on a silver platter, and in return the US got what? 10 billion in trade deficit balances? Completely laughable. Or the new Blue Dot(completely fitting name by the way)? https://asiatimes.com/2019/11/a-blue-dot-barely-visible-from-new-silk-roads/ https://asiatimes.com/2019/11/a-blue-dot-barely-visible-from... Blue Dot is described, officially, as promoting global, multi-stakeholder “sustainable infrastructure development in the Indo-Pacific region and around the world.” It is a joint project of the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation, in partnership with Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation. Now compare it with what just happened this same week at the inauguration of the China International Import Expo in Shanghai. As Xi stressed: “To date, China has signed 197 documents on Belt and Road cooperation with 137 countries and 30 international organizations.”
toast0 5y ago
> Few things are farther away from day-to-day programming that a white-board problem, but kernel development might just be one of them. Kernel development involves reading vague documentation (that might be wrong) and figuring out how to make things work with not always useful or immediate feedback. And reading other people's similar code to check for clues. If that's not relevant to day to day development, I've been working at the wrong places. Yes, you don't do a whole lot of page tables day to day; but ocassionally you might need to make something work better or faster, and having deep knowledge of how you might put something like that together will help a lot as you dive into the murky depths of whatever actual OS you work with. Or you could open a support ticket with your vendor, I dunno, people always say that's an option, but I've never seen it happen, and it takes longer to make a clean example program to share outside the company than it does to dig in and fix the problem.
gravypod 5y ago
> You would be thrilled, but would that get the candidate the job? At previous companies I've worked at (small statups) where I had a high influence on hiring: yes absolutely unless someone more qualified with the same excitement came around (aka Rob Pike walks in). At Google interviewing is complicated. There is a lot on the Google careers site about this if you're interested. If you brought this up while doing team matching it will make people's eyes light up. My TL liked that I was doing game dev, R&D, and OS dev for fun and I think it's a large part of why I was chosen for my team.
ajxs 5y ago
> Few things are farther away from day-to-day programming that a white-board problem, but kernel development might just be one of them. This is true. I'd counter that though by saying that I don't think there's any other project that's taught me more about the nature of what we do as programmers than Operating-System development, even just the little I've done. In order to build even the most basic, non-functional toy kernels you need to gather a comprehensive, holistic view of how compilers, operating systems, and computer hardware interact.
IQunder130 5y ago
Kernel development would be a stupid thing to put in your requirements list as it would generate too many false negatives, but it should definitely be a nice bonus for any candidate since it demonstrates a fairly high basic level of competence across the board. Nobody's complaining about whiteboard coding challenges because people who ace them suck at writing code. It's because a far greater number of perfectly competent programmers will fail any given challenge of that type above trivial complexity.
- monsieurbanana 5y ago
  > because people who ace them suck at writing code Is there such a high correlation? I used to do a lot of hackerrank-style problems for fun, a few years ago. If I had to evaluate my ability to write code back then: pretty crappy. I was good at writing functions, I was bad at writing programs.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    I think their point is, there's just so many bad candidates that even among those that pass whiteboard coding challenges, most can't code - but it increases the ratio of good to bad coders in the pool, so in lieu of a better option[0], it's still used. -- [0] - There are plenty of better options, but they tend to not scale - so they cost more, and companies avoid them.
    - IQunder130 5y ago
      No, that's not my point and it's extreme arrogance on your part to assume that coding is some sort of arcane art only accessible to a select few. Programming is a skill like any other, you develop it with experience. DS&A screening simply selects for people with a decent understanding of the fundamentals, even though it has a very high false negative rate.
  - IQunder130 5y ago
    You are probably more easily taught how to write good programs because a) your understanding of the basics is solid; b) let's face it, these brain teasers are often proxies for intelligence testing. If they have a glut of candidates for every position, whiteboarding data structures and algorithms makes for a decent filter.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ZephyrBlu 5y ago

I think in general people severely underestimate how useful seemly unrelated experience or knowledge is. Keeping with the example of creating an OS kernel, foundational programming skills translate across everything. So kernel development shouldn't be a negative signal in regards to programming ability. In regards to kernel development itself, I think it's probably very valuable experience not because of the programming but because of the perspective the person has gained. I have no experience with kernel development, but I would hazard that you need a very different mindset and approach compared to application development. I think the perspective you gain from being forced to adopt a different mindset and approach is massively undervalued by most people because it's not immediately obvious how that experience is useful or directly applicable.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
> I think in general people severely underestimate how useful seemly unrelated experience or knowledge is. I'd go as far as saying people who've never done this level of hobby work don't understand the amount and breadth of experience and knowledge one gains this way. A OS kernel or an assembler for a niche architecture aren't something you just do like another work task. It's not something you half-ass under deadline pressure by gluing together some third party libraries, StackOverflow tips and hastly skimmed documentation. Your boss would never agree to pay you for the amount of time and care that's involved in hobby projects like these. A month of such a project will teach you more about computing than a year on the job[0]. Unfortunately, this kind of experience is hard to keep track of and neatly summarize on your CV. If you tried, you'd end up with a page or three extra, and people would think you're just keyword stuffing, and doing it badly - referencing niche, unmarketable technologies, seemingly related to nothing[1]. These skills are important and very useful, but they don't look like it until you need them[1], and you're unlikely to pick them up on the job, unless there's already someone who had them before joining the company, and is now teaching others. There just isn't time. Taking care, or spending time sharpening the saw[2], is considered time not spent delivering business value. Since most software companies aren't really training their workforce much, it's kind of dumb to ignore off-work experience - after all, if your company isn't giving people time to skill up, why assume previous companies on a candidate's CV were different? -- [0] - It might not teach you how to work in a team setting, though. That's what jobs are good at. That, and teaching you what "good enough" is. [1] - Like, I wouldn't put "Event Tracing for Windows" as a qualification on my resume, even though me being familiar with it saved the company a lot of money they'd otherwise spend on people continuing to fruitlessly chase a heisenbug. [2] - Or, God forbid, writing tools for yourself.

chii 5y ago

Imagine in any other industry, where the candidate mentions irrelevant job experience, and expect that to be the criteria for acceptance into the job. For example, an actor applying for a role in a commercial might cite their side role in doing a theatrical production of hamlet for their community, but the interviewers (an advertising production agency) might only want to care how much professional experience they have shooting commercials. Sure, these experiences in "unrelated" work might show qualities that could be applied to this job. But you aint paid for your broad and wide interests in the topic - you are paid on being able to implement some work/feature that somebody else told you to do. And in fact, if you require intrinsic motivation to actually perform well, you might end up being a liability to the team, rather than an asset - after all, if the work is boring, and you lack intrinsic motivation for it, you might slack off, or over-engineer it to make the work more interesting to you. Or you might end up being a difficult person to work with for other team members because you sit so far above them intellectually.

homie 5y ago
The analogy here doesn't make sense. It'd be more like the actor mentioning that he doesn't have any experience doing commercial work, but he has acted in a theatrical production before (suggesting that he's adaptable and willing to do more than just one kind of acting job).
rjzzleep 5y ago
That's literally what happens for most business or leadership interviews. The only common thread for most of them is that they ran a company. They may know nothing about the market, the customer, the product or anything else related to the business, it may even have failed miserably, but because they have an MBA and hired a handful of people they're somehow competent for the job. How about we hold those people accountable to the same standards? Hell, most of your politicians are that way. You have dentists commenting on how pandemic response should be. For the last 4 years a failed business man con artist destroyed pretty much all he could get his hands on and he's still hailed as some sort of mythical creature. > Imagine in any other industry, where the candidate mentions irrelevant job experience, and expect that to be the criteria for acceptance into the job. Are you f'in kidding me? Either we hold the other useless part of society to the same standards we hold ourselves accountable to or we give each other a break. EDIT: and for all the ignorant folks thinking Trumps schoolyard bully rhetoric did anything but empower the CCP keep in mind that Chinas nickname for Trump is "Chuan Jian Guo". Trump the nation builder(guess who's nation they are talking about). And as much as I disliked Obama and his TPP, it was the answer to the new silk road. Trump basically handed China the entirety of Asias future on a silver platter, and in return the US got what? 10 billion in trade deficit balances? Completely laughable. Or the new Blue Dot(completely fitting name by the way)? https://asiatimes.com/2019/11/a-blue-dot-barely-visible-from-new-silk-roads/ https://asiatimes.com/2019/11/a-blue-dot-barely-visible-from... Blue Dot is described, officially, as promoting global, multi-stakeholder “sustainable infrastructure development in the Indo-Pacific region and around the world.” It is a joint project of the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation, in partnership with Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation. Now compare it with what just happened this same week at the inauguration of the China International Import Expo in Shanghai. As Xi stressed: “To date, China has signed 197 documents on Belt and Road cooperation with 137 countries and 30 international organizations.”

toast0 5y ago

> Few things are farther away from day-to-day programming that a white-board problem, but kernel development might just be one of them. Kernel development involves reading vague documentation (that might be wrong) and figuring out how to make things work with not always useful or immediate feedback. And reading other people's similar code to check for clues. If that's not relevant to day to day development, I've been working at the wrong places. Yes, you don't do a whole lot of page tables day to day; but ocassionally you might need to make something work better or faster, and having deep knowledge of how you might put something like that together will help a lot as you dive into the murky depths of whatever actual OS you work with. Or you could open a support ticket with your vendor, I dunno, people always say that's an option, but I've never seen it happen, and it takes longer to make a clean example program to share outside the company than it does to dig in and fix the problem.

gravypod 5y ago

> You would be thrilled, but would that get the candidate the job? At previous companies I've worked at (small statups) where I had a high influence on hiring: yes absolutely unless someone more qualified with the same excitement came around (aka Rob Pike walks in). At Google interviewing is complicated. There is a lot on the Google careers site about this if you're interested. If you brought this up while doing team matching it will make people's eyes light up. My TL liked that I was doing game dev, R&D, and OS dev for fun and I think it's a large part of why I was chosen for my team.

ajxs 5y ago

> Few things are farther away from day-to-day programming that a white-board problem, but kernel development might just be one of them. This is true. I'd counter that though by saying that I don't think there's any other project that's taught me more about the nature of what we do as programmers than Operating-System development, even just the little I've done. In order to build even the most basic, non-functional toy kernels you need to gather a comprehensive, holistic view of how compilers, operating systems, and computer hardware interact.

IQunder130 5y ago

Kernel development would be a stupid thing to put in your requirements list as it would generate too many false negatives, but it should definitely be a nice bonus for any candidate since it demonstrates a fairly high basic level of competence across the board. Nobody's complaining about whiteboard coding challenges because people who ace them suck at writing code. It's because a far greater number of perfectly competent programmers will fail any given challenge of that type above trivial complexity.

monsieurbanana 5y ago
> because people who ace them suck at writing code Is there such a high correlation? I used to do a lot of hackerrank-style problems for fun, a few years ago. If I had to evaluate my ability to write code back then: pretty crappy. I was good at writing functions, I was bad at writing programs.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  I think their point is, there's just so many bad candidates that even among those that pass whiteboard coding challenges, most can't code - but it increases the ratio of good to bad coders in the pool, so in lieu of a better option[0], it's still used. -- [0] - There are plenty of better options, but they tend to not scale - so they cost more, and companies avoid them.
  - IQunder130 5y ago
    No, that's not my point and it's extreme arrogance on your part to assume that coding is some sort of arcane art only accessible to a select few. Programming is a skill like any other, you develop it with experience. DS&A screening simply selects for people with a decent understanding of the fundamentals, even though it has a very high false negative rate.
- IQunder130 5y ago
  You are probably more easily taught how to write good programs because a) your understanding of the basics is solid; b) let's face it, these brain teasers are often proxies for intelligence testing. If they have a glut of candidates for every position, whiteboarding data structures and algorithms makes for a decent filter.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]