4 ms·

I hardly believe someone with a heavy code contribution on GitHub can't write a simple loop on the whiteboard.

by meerita 13y ago

jedberg 13y ago
I had trouble believing it too until it happened multiple times.
- eru 13y ago
  Hire the guy as a manager (or headhunter), and hire the guy who actually did the coding as a programmer.
- lfuller 13y ago
  This is very common, and there was a pretty lengthy discussion about interview anxiety on HN a few weeks ago. Had this person been tasked with writing a loop outside of an interview environment, they likely would have had no issues at all.
  - jedberg 13y ago
    Definitely not. I ask FizzBuzz. It starts with writing a loop to print out 1 through 100 in their language of choice. They can't even do that.
- DigitalSea 13y ago
  This is the problem with the software industry right here. Managers who think it matters if a developer can draw code and solve problems on a whiteboard. In my whole 10 years and counting in the industry, I have never once seen a whiteboard used a pre-coding pad because at the end of the day, developers are hackers, not professors writing a code thesis on a whiteboard. The whole whiteboard approach is severely outdated, it might work for some companies, but it's 2013, not 1979, developers have the Internet to solve most of their problems now. I think the real test of a developers skill is to ask them to code something for you. As a developer myself, i would fail any whiteboard interview because most of the problems I solve aren't because of solutions I've come up in my head, they are because I knew what to search on Google to find the solution. And to anyone who thinks this makes a bad developer, round up a group of 20 developers and ask them how often they use Google searches to solve problems they encounter. The difference between good developers and bad developers is not if you can solve every problem on your own, it's having the skills to know what to search when you encounter a problem. Us developers are over-glorified web searchers with a simple understanding of the language we are developing in.
  - elementai 13y ago
    Obligatory link "I will not do your tech interview" by Ike Ellis https://medium.com/lessons-learned/80ba19c55883 https://medium.com/lessons-learned/80ba19c55883
  - VLM 13y ago
    Mostly agree with minor exception of ask them to debug something not code something. More time is spent fixing changing (for the sake of change of course) and updating and upgrading than plain blank sheet starting. Also, debugging code is harder. Any idiot can write something that occasionally works with some limited simple input and doesn't need to scale or do much error handling or recovery or cooperate with the OPS guys and their designs in any way. If you hire a guy who can code but not debug what he wrote, you're in big trouble sooner or later. Give em a fizzbuzz with pathological parenthesis which mess it up, or half a fizzbuzz and ask them to finish it. Or give them a mortgage amortization calculator or similar with an obvious fencepost/off-by-one error (this is almost more of a spreadsheet problem than a real programming problem, but...). This is almost too stereotypical of a classroom task, but give them an OO design of a simulation of an elevator (literal, not an analogy) and ask him to add another floor to the elevator design, or add a fire dept override keyswitch, or maybe implement those door sensors so it doesn't move if any doors are open. Given a really crude simple importer for CSV text files, make it smarter so it can handle embedded commas inside quotes. Here's a crude simple roman numeral to decimal translator which handles I and V, now either add X or add prefix notation or whatever its called where IV = 4 not 6. Here's the worlds dumbest prime number checker which tests all positive integers smaller than the test number for divisibility... your task is make it faster.
    - jedberg 13y ago
      > Any idiot can write something that occasionally works with some limited simple input and doesn't need to scale or do much error handling or recovery or cooperate with the OPS guys and their designs in any way. You'd like to think so, but what I'm saying is that isn't the case. > Give em a fizzbuzz with pathological parenthesis which mess it up, or half a fizzbuzz and ask them to finish it. I ask them to write regular FizzBuzz and they can't. :(
- anupshinde 13y ago
  Define "simple loop". Its really hard to believe what you said .

I hardly believe someone with a heavy code contribution on GitHub can't write a simple loop on the whiteboard.

by meerita 13y ago

I hardly believe someone with a heavy code contribution on GitHub can't write a simple loop on the whiteboard.

jedberg 13y ago

I had trouble believing it too until it happened multiple times.

eru 13y ago
Hire the guy as a manager (or headhunter), and hire the guy who actually did the coding as a programmer.
lfuller 13y ago
This is very common, and there was a pretty lengthy discussion about interview anxiety on HN a few weeks ago. Had this person been tasked with writing a loop outside of an interview environment, they likely would have had no issues at all.
- jedberg 13y ago
  Definitely not. I ask FizzBuzz. It starts with writing a loop to print out 1 through 100 in their language of choice. They can't even do that.
DigitalSea 13y ago
This is the problem with the software industry right here. Managers who think it matters if a developer can draw code and solve problems on a whiteboard. In my whole 10 years and counting in the industry, I have never once seen a whiteboard used a pre-coding pad because at the end of the day, developers are hackers, not professors writing a code thesis on a whiteboard. The whole whiteboard approach is severely outdated, it might work for some companies, but it's 2013, not 1979, developers have the Internet to solve most of their problems now. I think the real test of a developers skill is to ask them to code something for you. As a developer myself, i would fail any whiteboard interview because most of the problems I solve aren't because of solutions I've come up in my head, they are because I knew what to search on Google to find the solution. And to anyone who thinks this makes a bad developer, round up a group of 20 developers and ask them how often they use Google searches to solve problems they encounter. The difference between good developers and bad developers is not if you can solve every problem on your own, it's having the skills to know what to search when you encounter a problem. Us developers are over-glorified web searchers with a simple understanding of the language we are developing in.
- elementai 13y ago
  Obligatory link "I will not do your tech interview" by Ike Ellis https://medium.com/lessons-learned/80ba19c55883 https://medium.com/lessons-learned/80ba19c55883
- VLM 13y ago
  Mostly agree with minor exception of ask them to debug something not code something. More time is spent fixing changing (for the sake of change of course) and updating and upgrading than plain blank sheet starting. Also, debugging code is harder. Any idiot can write something that occasionally works with some limited simple input and doesn't need to scale or do much error handling or recovery or cooperate with the OPS guys and their designs in any way. If you hire a guy who can code but not debug what he wrote, you're in big trouble sooner or later. Give em a fizzbuzz with pathological parenthesis which mess it up, or half a fizzbuzz and ask them to finish it. Or give them a mortgage amortization calculator or similar with an obvious fencepost/off-by-one error (this is almost more of a spreadsheet problem than a real programming problem, but...). This is almost too stereotypical of a classroom task, but give them an OO design of a simulation of an elevator (literal, not an analogy) and ask him to add another floor to the elevator design, or add a fire dept override keyswitch, or maybe implement those door sensors so it doesn't move if any doors are open. Given a really crude simple importer for CSV text files, make it smarter so it can handle embedded commas inside quotes. Here's a crude simple roman numeral to decimal translator which handles I and V, now either add X or add prefix notation or whatever its called where IV = 4 not 6. Here's the worlds dumbest prime number checker which tests all positive integers smaller than the test number for divisibility... your task is make it faster.
  - jedberg 13y ago
    > Any idiot can write something that occasionally works with some limited simple input and doesn't need to scale or do much error handling or recovery or cooperate with the OPS guys and their designs in any way. You'd like to think so, but what I'm saying is that isn't the case. > Give em a fizzbuzz with pathological parenthesis which mess it up, or half a fizzbuzz and ask them to finish it. I ask them to write regular FizzBuzz and they can't. :(
anupshinde 13y ago
Define "simple loop". Its really hard to believe what you said .