6 ms·

I was asked by an SME to code on a whiteboard for an interview (in 2005? I think?). I asked if I could have a computer, they said no. I asked if I would be usin

I was asked by an SME to code on a whiteboard for an interview (in 2005? I think?). I asked if I could have a computer, they said no. I asked if I would be using a whiteboard during my day-to-day. They said no. I asked why they used whiteboards, they said they were mimicking Google's best practice. That discussion went on for a good few minutes and by the end of it I was teetering on leaving because the fit wasn't good. I agreed to do it as long as they understood that I felt it was a terrible way of assessing someone's ability to code. I was allowed to use any programming language because they knew them all (allegedly). The solution was a pretty obvious bit-shift. So I wrote memory registers up on the board and did it in Motorola 68000 Assembler (because I had been doing a lot of it around that time), halfway through they stopped me and I said I'd be happy to do it again if they gave me a computer. The offered me the job. I went elsewhere.

thecleaner 2y ago
Take a bow.
- user432678 2y ago
  And my axe…
Clubber 2y ago
>I was allowed to use any programming language because they knew them all (allegedly). After 30 years of doing this, I find that typically the people who claim to know a lot often know very little. They're insecure in their ability so much that they've tricked themselves into not learning anything.
Rhapso 2y ago
Yeah, very bad fit. Surprised they made an offer. Folks getting mad about whiteboard interviews is a meme at this point. It misses the point. We CANT test you effectively on your programming skillbase. So we test on a more relevant job skill, like can you have a real conversation (with a whiteboard to help) about how to solve the problem. It isn't that your interviewer knew all the languages, but that the language didn't matter. I didn't get this until I was giving interviews. The instructions on how to give them are pretty clear. The goal isn't to "solve the puzzle" but instead to demonstrate you can reason about it effectively, communicate your knowledge and communicate as part of problem solving. I know many interviewers also didn't get it, and it became just "do you know the trick to my puzzle". That pattern of failure is a good reason to deprecate white board interviews, not "I don't write on a whiteboard when i program in real life".
- timr 2y ago
  > We CANT test you effectively on your programming skillbase. So we test on a more relevant job skill, like can you have a real conversation (with a whiteboard to help) about how to solve the problem. Except, that's not what happens. In basically every coding interview in my life, it's been a gauntlet: code this leetcode medium/hard problem while singing and tapdancing backwards. Screw up in any way -- or worse (and also commonly) miss the obscure trick that brings the solution to the next level of algorithmic complexity -- and your interview day is over. And it's only gotten worse over time, in that nowadays, interviewers start with the leetcode medium as the "warmup exercise". That's nuts. It's not a one off. The people doing these interviews either don't know what they're supposed to be looking for, or they're at a big tech company and their mandate is to be a severe winnowing function. > It isn't that your interviewer knew all the languages, but that the language didn't matter. I've done enough programming interviews to know that using even a marginally exotic language (like, say, Ruby) will drastically reduce your success rate. You either use a language that your interviewer knows well, or you're adding a level of friction that will hurt you. Interviewers love to say that language doesn't matter, but in practice, if they can't know that you're not making up the syntax, then it dials up the skepticism level.
  - jerf 2y ago
    They generally do not know what they are looking for. They are generally untrained, and if they are trained, the training is probably all about using leetcode-type problems to give out interviews that are sufficiently similar that you can run stats on the results and call them "objective", which is exactly the thing we are all quite correctly complaining about. Which is perhaps anti-training. The problem is that the business side wants to reduce it to an objective checklist, but you can't do that because of Goodhart's Law [1]. AI is throwing this problem into focus because it is basically capable of passing any objective checklist, with just a bit of human driving [2]. Interviews can not consist of "I'm going to ask a question and if you give me the objectively correct answer you get a point and if you do not give the objectively correct answer you do not". The risk of hiring someone who could give the objectively correct answers but couldn't program their way out of a wet paper bag, let alone do requirements elicitation in collaboration with other humans or architecture or risk analysis or any of the many other things that a real engineering job consists of, was already pretty high before AI. But if interviewing is not a matter of saying the objectively correct things, a lot of people at all levels are just incapable of handling it after that. The Western philosophical mindset doesn't handle this sort of thing very well. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law [2]: Note this is not necessarily bad because "AI bad!", but, if all the human on the other end can offer me is that they can drive the AI, I don't need them. I can do it myself and/or hire any number of other such people. You need to bring something to the job other than the ability to drive an AI and you need to demonstrate whatever that is in the interview process. I can type what you tell me into a computer and then fail to comprehend the answer it gives is not a value-add.
Shorel 2y ago
2005? You were in the right. Today? Now that's when it is tricky. How can we know you are not one of these prompt "engineers" copy paster? That's the issue being discussed. 20 years and many new technologies of difference.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  What is the functional difference between copying an AI answer and copying a StackOverflow answer, in terms of it being "cheating" during an interview? I think the entire question is missing the forest for the trees. I have never asked a candidate to write code in any fashion during an interview. I talk to them. I ask them how they would solve problems, chase down bugs, or implement new features. I ask about concepts like OOP. I ask about what they've worked on previously, what they found interesting, what they found frustrating, etc. Languages are largely teachable, it's just syntax and keywords. What I can't teach people is how to think like programmers need to: how to break down big, hard problems into smaller problems and implement solutions. If you know that, I can teach you fucking Swift, it isn't THAT complicated and there's about 5 million examples of "how do I $X" available all over the Internet.
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > Languages are largely teachable, it's just syntax and keywords. This is like "learning a natural language is just 'cramming vocabulary and grammar' - voila, you've become a fluent C1 speaker". :-) Seriously: if you argue this way, you have only seen a very biased set of programming languages, and additionally, your knowledge of these programming languages is very superficial (i.e. you have never gotten to the "interesting"/"deep" concepts that make this particular programming language special, and which are hard to replicate in most other programming languages).
    - endemic 2y ago
      I think the argument is that for a good chunk of business work, you don't need to use the "interesting"/"deep" concepts. Sure, you'll need time to adapt to the idioms of the language you're using, but following examples you can be just as productive as others in a relatively short time.
piyuv 2y ago
You should’ve asked them “do you also mimic google’s compensation?”
- CYR1X 2y ago
  Oh man I needed that in the clip for like a dozen interviews a decade ago.
- janoc 2y ago
  This zinger I have to remember for the next time someone tries this whiteboard BS on me!
- blitzar 2y ago
  "How many google shares do I get?"
- wiejriljw 2y ago
  I work for a faang subsidiary. We pay well below average salary and equity. We finally got one nice perk, a very good 401k match. A few months later it was announced that the 401k match would be scaled back "to come in line with what our parent company offers". I thought about asking "will be getting salaries or equity in line with what our parent company offers?" but that would have been useless. Management doesn't care. I'm job hunting.
tokai 2y ago
>I was allowed to use any programming language because they knew them all (allegedly). brainfuck time
- codr7 2y ago
  Hehe, I have to remember to bring one of my custom Forths to the next interview.
  - xmx98 2y ago
    As an interviewer I’d just skip the questions and talk about your Forth haha
    - codr7 2y ago
      Even better :) I have yet to come across an interviewer who has a clue about anything that interests me.
whiplash451 2y ago
> I was asked by an SME to code on a whiteboard for an interview (in 2005? I think?). I asked if I could have a computer, they said no. I asked if I would be using a whiteboard during my day-to-day. They said no. I asked why they used whiteboards, they said they were mimicking Google's best practice. This looks more like a culture fit test than a coding test.
bossyTeacher 2y ago
> The offered me the job. I went elsewhere. I am so happy that you did this. We vote with our feet and sadly, too many tech folks are unwilling to use their power or have golden handcuff tunnel vision.
Exoristos 2y ago
Are there people who still aren't aware that FAANGs developed this kind of thing to bypass H1-B regulations?

thecleaner 2y ago

Take a bow.

user432678 2y ago
And my axe…

Clubber 2y ago

>I was allowed to use any programming language because they knew them all (allegedly). After 30 years of doing this, I find that typically the people who claim to know a lot often know very little. They're insecure in their ability so much that they've tricked themselves into not learning anything.

Rhapso 2y ago

Yeah, very bad fit. Surprised they made an offer. Folks getting mad about whiteboard interviews is a meme at this point. It misses the point. We CANT test you effectively on your programming skillbase. So we test on a more relevant job skill, like can you have a real conversation (with a whiteboard to help) about how to solve the problem. It isn't that your interviewer knew all the languages, but that the language didn't matter. I didn't get this until I was giving interviews. The instructions on how to give them are pretty clear. The goal isn't to "solve the puzzle" but instead to demonstrate you can reason about it effectively, communicate your knowledge and communicate as part of problem solving. I know many interviewers also didn't get it, and it became just "do you know the trick to my puzzle". That pattern of failure is a good reason to deprecate white board interviews, not "I don't write on a whiteboard when i program in real life".

timr 2y ago
> We CANT test you effectively on your programming skillbase. So we test on a more relevant job skill, like can you have a real conversation (with a whiteboard to help) about how to solve the problem. Except, that's not what happens. In basically every coding interview in my life, it's been a gauntlet: code this leetcode medium/hard problem while singing and tapdancing backwards. Screw up in any way -- or worse (and also commonly) miss the obscure trick that brings the solution to the next level of algorithmic complexity -- and your interview day is over. And it's only gotten worse over time, in that nowadays, interviewers start with the leetcode medium as the "warmup exercise". That's nuts. It's not a one off. The people doing these interviews either don't know what they're supposed to be looking for, or they're at a big tech company and their mandate is to be a severe winnowing function. > It isn't that your interviewer knew all the languages, but that the language didn't matter. I've done enough programming interviews to know that using even a marginally exotic language (like, say, Ruby) will drastically reduce your success rate. You either use a language that your interviewer knows well, or you're adding a level of friction that will hurt you. Interviewers love to say that language doesn't matter, but in practice, if they can't know that you're not making up the syntax, then it dials up the skepticism level.
- jerf 2y ago
  They generally do not know what they are looking for. They are generally untrained, and if they are trained, the training is probably all about using leetcode-type problems to give out interviews that are sufficiently similar that you can run stats on the results and call them "objective", which is exactly the thing we are all quite correctly complaining about. Which is perhaps anti-training. The problem is that the business side wants to reduce it to an objective checklist, but you can't do that because of Goodhart's Law [1]. AI is throwing this problem into focus because it is basically capable of passing any objective checklist, with just a bit of human driving [2]. Interviews can not consist of "I'm going to ask a question and if you give me the objectively correct answer you get a point and if you do not give the objectively correct answer you do not". The risk of hiring someone who could give the objectively correct answers but couldn't program their way out of a wet paper bag, let alone do requirements elicitation in collaboration with other humans or architecture or risk analysis or any of the many other things that a real engineering job consists of, was already pretty high before AI. But if interviewing is not a matter of saying the objectively correct things, a lot of people at all levels are just incapable of handling it after that. The Western philosophical mindset doesn't handle this sort of thing very well. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law [2]: Note this is not necessarily bad because "AI bad!", but, if all the human on the other end can offer me is that they can drive the AI, I don't need them. I can do it myself and/or hire any number of other such people. You need to bring something to the job other than the ability to drive an AI and you need to demonstrate whatever that is in the interview process. I can type what you tell me into a computer and then fail to comprehend the answer it gives is not a value-add.

Shorel 2y ago

2005? You were in the right. Today? Now that's when it is tricky. How can we know you are not one of these prompt "engineers" copy paster? That's the issue being discussed. 20 years and many new technologies of difference.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
What is the functional difference between copying an AI answer and copying a StackOverflow answer, in terms of it being "cheating" during an interview? I think the entire question is missing the forest for the trees. I have never asked a candidate to write code in any fashion during an interview. I talk to them. I ask them how they would solve problems, chase down bugs, or implement new features. I ask about concepts like OOP. I ask about what they've worked on previously, what they found interesting, what they found frustrating, etc. Languages are largely teachable, it's just syntax and keywords. What I can't teach people is how to think like programmers need to: how to break down big, hard problems into smaller problems and implement solutions. If you know that, I can teach you fucking Swift, it isn't THAT complicated and there's about 5 million examples of "how do I $X" available all over the Internet.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > Languages are largely teachable, it's just syntax and keywords. This is like "learning a natural language is just 'cramming vocabulary and grammar' - voila, you've become a fluent C1 speaker". :-) Seriously: if you argue this way, you have only seen a very biased set of programming languages, and additionally, your knowledge of these programming languages is very superficial (i.e. you have never gotten to the "interesting"/"deep" concepts that make this particular programming language special, and which are hard to replicate in most other programming languages).
  - endemic 2y ago
    I think the argument is that for a good chunk of business work, you don't need to use the "interesting"/"deep" concepts. Sure, you'll need time to adapt to the idioms of the language you're using, but following examples you can be just as productive as others in a relatively short time.

piyuv 2y ago

You should’ve asked them “do you also mimic google’s compensation?”

CYR1X 2y ago
Oh man I needed that in the clip for like a dozen interviews a decade ago.
janoc 2y ago
This zinger I have to remember for the next time someone tries this whiteboard BS on me!
blitzar 2y ago
"How many google shares do I get?"
wiejriljw 2y ago
I work for a faang subsidiary. We pay well below average salary and equity. We finally got one nice perk, a very good 401k match. A few months later it was announced that the 401k match would be scaled back "to come in line with what our parent company offers". I thought about asking "will be getting salaries or equity in line with what our parent company offers?" but that would have been useless. Management doesn't care. I'm job hunting.

tokai 2y ago

>I was allowed to use any programming language because they knew them all (allegedly). brainfuck time

codr7 2y ago
Hehe, I have to remember to bring one of my custom Forths to the next interview.
- xmx98 2y ago
  As an interviewer I’d just skip the questions and talk about your Forth haha
  - codr7 2y ago
    Even better :) I have yet to come across an interviewer who has a clue about anything that interests me.

whiplash451 2y ago

> I was asked by an SME to code on a whiteboard for an interview (in 2005? I think?). I asked if I could have a computer, they said no. I asked if I would be using a whiteboard during my day-to-day. They said no. I asked why they used whiteboards, they said they were mimicking Google's best practice. This looks more like a culture fit test than a coding test.

bossyTeacher 2y ago

> The offered me the job. I went elsewhere. I am so happy that you did this. We vote with our feet and sadly, too many tech folks are unwilling to use their power or have golden handcuff tunnel vision.

Exoristos 2y ago

Are there people who still aren't aware that FAANGs developed this kind of thing to bypass H1-B regulations?