13 ms·

Imagine you were in charge of casting for your community theater's production of Hamlet. How would you decide who to cast? I'm guessing you would find it sensi

Imagine you were in charge of casting for your community theater's production of Hamlet. How would you decide who to cast? I'm guessing you would find it sensible to hold auditions. Does an audition perfectly mimic what they would actually spend their time doing come showtime? No. There isn't an audience, the lighting and acoustics are different, nobody is wearing costumes, everyone is standing in the same place instead of moving around, people are reading from scripts instead of having lines memorized, etc. The audition isn't intended to mirror a performance - it's intended to give some insight into how someone may perform. Likewise, whiteboarding isn't intended to replicate a typical day in the life of a software developer. It's intended to give a glimpse into how you solve problems. As I said above, it's not perfect, but it's far more useful than hiring someone without any coding exercises and basing your decision just on how well they answer questions or what their background is. In fact the whole point of the post you're commenting on is to point out the foolishness of basing hiring decisions solely on having X years of experience in Y technology.

mtviewdave 12y ago
>As I said above, it's not perfect, but it's far more useful than hiring someone without any coding exercises Whiteboarding vs no coding exercises is a false dichotomy. There are ways to test coding in a 45 minute interview that don't involve standing in front of a whiteboard, writing with a marker.
- frostmatthew 12y ago
  > Whiteboarding vs no coding exercises is a false dichotomy. Sorry, it wasn't my intention to suggest those were the only two options (I was attempting to comment on the benefits of coding exercises, regardless of method). Using a computer is certainly as good or better than a whiteboard. Though one of the bigger downsides to using a computer is there's generally this expectation you need to write "real" code that actually compiles and runs and so the focus becomes as much on writing syntactically correct code as about how you solve the problem (when only the latter has value).

mtviewdave 12y ago

>As I said above, it's not perfect, but it's far more useful than hiring someone without any coding exercises Whiteboarding vs no coding exercises is a false dichotomy. There are ways to test coding in a 45 minute interview that don't involve standing in front of a whiteboard, writing with a marker.

frostmatthew 12y ago
> Whiteboarding vs no coding exercises is a false dichotomy. Sorry, it wasn't my intention to suggest those were the only two options (I was attempting to comment on the benefits of coding exercises, regardless of method). Using a computer is certainly as good or better than a whiteboard. Though one of the bigger downsides to using a computer is there's generally this expectation you need to write "real" code that actually compiles and runs and so the focus becomes as much on writing syntactically correct code as about how you solve the problem (when only the latter has value).