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Is the whiteboard interview perfect? No, there is no perfect method. Disclaimer, I give lots of white board interviews. What am I looking for? Syntax? Nope, I
by jboy55 11y ago
Is the whiteboard interview perfect? No, there is no perfect method.
Disclaimer, I give lots of white board interviews. What am I looking for?
Syntax? Nope, I let the candidate use any language they want, they can even make it up as they go, as long as its consistent and doesn't contain magic. Most of my questions are simple and operate on arrays.
A good talker? Not really, although someone who freezes up and can't talk might be an issue discussing their ideas in a group, but its not disqualification. The number of people who have been actively anxious to the point they can't code anything on the whiteboard? Never encountered it, I've given maybe 500 white board questions.
My question revolves around iterating through an array, keeping track of a couple of pointers, and doing some simple swaps, its a sorting problem. I'm looking for people who can think 'step by step', people who can look at a very simple program, and keep track of how its executing.
You might say, you have an IDE to do that! IMHO, Any decent programmer can look at 8 lines of code and step through that . Most of the time, when I'm debugging something in prod, I only have a stack trace and the source code. I have to figure out how the trace could have been thrown, and I have to step through a bunch of code to figure that out.
Finally, Whiteboard coding is a skill, just like how to debug or how to import a project into an IDE; its a necessary skill to get a job. Plus, when I look around my room, I can spot 3-4 whiteboards, all of them have code and diagrams written on them. None of those came from an interview, those are all the result of one engineer communicating to others about their ideas.
edit: Last thing, the alternatives, side by side keyboard coding, a take home project. All of these have cons, keyboard anxiety is just a prevalent as whiteboard, just a different medium. Take home projects are nice, if you expect a candidate to spend a weekend coding for your interview. Just as people have walked out because of a whiteboard interview (something I've never encountered), I've actually dropped pursuing a company when they gave me a fairly complex take home project when I was at the offer stage at a different one. Fuck spending a day working on some throw away work and not get the job.
- oldmanjay 11y ago>Finally, Whiteboard coding is a skill, just like how to debug or how to import a project into an IDE; its a necessary skill to get a job. I mean... it's a necessary skill to get a job from you. It's far from universal, as evidenced by the fact that I have been employed as a software engineer for quite some time and have never done whiteboard coding in my life.
- learc83 11y agoI don't think it's a problem with the whiteboard specifically or even public speaking. It's a unique situation where you're trying to solve a problem, while simultaneously explaining it to a person you've never met before, who happens to already know the answer. Explaining something on a whiteboard to a group of co-workers is an entirely different skill. > Fuck spending a day working on some throw away work and not get the job. You can easily make a shorter take home project. You're already going to have to spend a day on interviews. Why not spend half a day on interviews, and half a day at home on a take home project?
- cnp 11y agoI've choked so bad on whiteboarding interviews that I've felt ashamed for weeks; yes, I am one of those people. But then when I broke the anxiety after practice, they became easy. The key is understanding that it's the process over the solution. However, I'm quite proud of the fact that where I currently work we never ask someone to code on a whiteboard. Rather, we ask them to complete a take home test and then, when they're ready, invite them in to discuss their choices and augment it functionally. This practice is, in my opinion, holistically far more effective at gauging a candidate's competence and ability.
- learc83 11y agoThat is a far superior method for conducting an interview. Even though I'm not terrible at whiteboard interviews, I absolutely hate working while someone who already knows the answers watches over me waiting for a mistake.
- twistedpair 11y agoSadly I was able to find various great solutions to my take home programming assignments after the fact. I submitted my own original solutions, but I'm sure there are others that didn't bother/know how and submitted the other solutions they found online. I'd like to think the interviewer had an exhaustive list of Google search results for the problem, but I sadly doubt it.
- cnp 11y agoWhat I mean about take home test is "build an app that does x y and z, write tests, talk about your choices" -- something that you can't quite google. Take home tests for questions like "explain how to use fn.apply()" wouldn't work :)