4 ms·

God, programmers are the biggest whiners in the world when it comes to interviewing. Do you know the shit doctors and lawyers have to go through to get hired? I

God, programmers are the biggest whiners in the world when it comes to interviewing. Do you know the shit doctors and lawyers have to go through to get hired? If you did, you'd thank Jesus that all you have to do is solve problems on a whiteboard. If you can't do it, then here's a simple and effective solution for you: practice!

smitherfield 11y ago
Doctors and lawyers do have to go through a long and expensive process to become doctors and lawyers, but once they pass the bar/finish their residency their hiring process is much the same as anyone else. They are certainly not made to do some weird Kabuki theater demonstration where they are forced to quickly solve some difficult problem that has little or nothing to do with their work. Peoples' assessments of the difficulty of work depends on how much they enjoy it. Most lawyers would probably consider passing the bar exam, while difficult, to be easier than learning a programming language. If they were told that our normal hiring process consists of being made to hand-write on a whiteboard, in Java or C++, the most optimal algorithm for a randomly-chosen complex mathematical problem, in 30 minutes or less, with someone watching and critiquing you the entire time, and if your answer is in any way suboptimal you aren't hired, no matter how impressive your previous body of work - then they (the doctor or lawyer) would undoubtedly wonder why we would ever put up with such a thing.
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jtreminio 11y ago
Last I checked, doctors make quite a bit more than the average programmer.
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patmcguire 11y ago
My impression for law interviews is that they're not super technical. They're all "Tell me about yourself," "What's your interest in the organization," "What did you think of the way your law school taught" — the kind of questions that only have wrong answers, which is its own special hell, but a different hell. No one's asking for precedents or deep incisive analysis, really, but I guess they can count on the bar exam to ensure a minimum level of competence. Is my understanding of this wrong? For doctors I have no idea.
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  - learc83 11y ago
    Yeah once time at the beginning of their career. A programmer can have 10 years of experience and a huge body of prior work up on Github for everyone to see, and yet he still has to get up in front of a whiteboard and answer questions about dropping eggs from a building, or reversing strings.
rhizome 11y ago
Lawyers and doctors have board certifications and licenses that make their interview experiences fundamentally incomparable to programming interviews.
twistedpair 11y ago
Amen. And don't forget the "learn just enough to be dangerous" coding academies out there. Plus all of the developers that just Google their problem and use the blog/SO code from the first hit as their work. Finally we've got plenty of IDE's and plugins for said IDE's that can generate all the code you need, though without understanding why it was generated that way, what it really does, and how it will fail. In short, it's far too easy to fake being a coder. The Whiteboard is a great way to see if they can hack it, and hence it's been around for two decades or more. But then there are all the introverted Google search coders out there that don't like talking with other human beings. For them, whiteboard coding and being asked "why" they used this or that method is too much to handle, hence the cheers of "down with the whiteboard!"
innocentoldguy 11y ago
In the case of doctors, yes, I do. They demonstrate that they have a medical degree, have completed their residency, have passed their boards, and then provide proof of prior work experience. What they don't have to do is perform some esoteric and completely irrelevant surgical procedure on a gourd. The reason the practical among us are complaining about whiteboard questions is: 1. They are arcane and esoteric and do not reflect the day-to-day activities of the company. 2. Programming is an iterative process complete with tools, visual feedback, and documentation. A whiteboard question takes away all these things and puts the engineer in an unrealistic situation. Using you doctor example, it would be like asking a doctor to prove their medical skills by performing a microtia repair on a banana using a bra and a bouncy house. Fun, of course, but completely irrelevant. 3. They are the sign of an unskilled interviewer. Personally, I have no interest in practicing to master the impractical, irrelevant, and incompetent whiteboard question skill when I can simply go interview with a company who knows how to conduct an effective interview. Maybe the prestige of working at Google or Microsoft is worth it to people to slog their way through those kinds of interviews. Personally, I went through Microsoft's interview process and ended up working there for over a year. I've had better jobs and I still think their interview process is retarded. I certainly wouldn't put myself through it again.
- LordHumungous 11y ago
  > They demonstrate that they have a medical degree, have completed their residency, have passed their boards, and then provide proof of prior work experience. Oh, you mean that's all they have to do? If you think being judged by a whiteboard problem is arbitrary, imagine being judged by your score on a fill in the bubble boards exam. And even after getting their degree and passing the boards, doctors still have to go through an interview that would make the average programmer cry. I worked directly with doctors for several years, and almost tried to become one myself. The shit they have to deal with is on a whole other order of magnitude from anything programmers go through.
  - innocentoldguy 11y ago
    I have worked with surgeons and anesthesiologists for the last 12 years, so I know what they have to do as well. One important thing to keep in mind is that a surgeon or anesthesiologist is taking their patients' health, and even their lives, into their hands when they operate. I've written code for 25 years and nobody's life has ever been at stake. Furthermore, when something is stupid and a waste of time, it should be discussed, dealt with, and eliminated; regardless of how many other stupid things exist in life.

smitherfield 11y ago

Doctors and lawyers do have to go through a long and expensive process to become doctors and lawyers, but once they pass the bar/finish their residency their hiring process is much the same as anyone else. They are certainly not made to do some weird Kabuki theater demonstration where they are forced to quickly solve some difficult problem that has little or nothing to do with their work. Peoples' assessments of the difficulty of work depends on how much they enjoy it. Most lawyers would probably consider passing the bar exam, while difficult, to be easier than learning a programming language. If they were told that our normal hiring process consists of being made to hand-write on a whiteboard, in Java or C++, the most optimal algorithm for a randomly-chosen complex mathematical problem, in 30 minutes or less, with someone watching and critiquing you the entire time, and if your answer is in any way suboptimal you aren't hired, no matter how impressive your previous body of work - then they (the doctor or lawyer) would undoubtedly wonder why we would ever put up with such a thing.

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jtreminio 11y ago

Last I checked, doctors make quite a bit more than the average programmer.

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patmcguire 11y ago

My impression for law interviews is that they're not super technical. They're all "Tell me about yourself," "What's your interest in the organization," "What did you think of the way your law school taught" — the kind of questions that only have wrong answers, which is its own special hell, but a different hell. No one's asking for precedents or deep incisive analysis, really, but I guess they can count on the bar exam to ensure a minimum level of competence. Is my understanding of this wrong? For doctors I have no idea.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- learc83 11y ago
  Yeah once time at the beginning of their career. A programmer can have 10 years of experience and a huge body of prior work up on Github for everyone to see, and yet he still has to get up in front of a whiteboard and answer questions about dropping eggs from a building, or reversing strings.

rhizome 11y ago

Lawyers and doctors have board certifications and licenses that make their interview experiences fundamentally incomparable to programming interviews.

twistedpair 11y ago

Amen. And don't forget the "learn just enough to be dangerous" coding academies out there. Plus all of the developers that just Google their problem and use the blog/SO code from the first hit as their work. Finally we've got plenty of IDE's and plugins for said IDE's that can generate all the code you need, though without understanding why it was generated that way, what it really does, and how it will fail. In short, it's far too easy to fake being a coder. The Whiteboard is a great way to see if they can hack it, and hence it's been around for two decades or more. But then there are all the introverted Google search coders out there that don't like talking with other human beings. For them, whiteboard coding and being asked "why" they used this or that method is too much to handle, hence the cheers of "down with the whiteboard!"

innocentoldguy 11y ago

In the case of doctors, yes, I do. They demonstrate that they have a medical degree, have completed their residency, have passed their boards, and then provide proof of prior work experience. What they don't have to do is perform some esoteric and completely irrelevant surgical procedure on a gourd. The reason the practical among us are complaining about whiteboard questions is: 1. They are arcane and esoteric and do not reflect the day-to-day activities of the company. 2. Programming is an iterative process complete with tools, visual feedback, and documentation. A whiteboard question takes away all these things and puts the engineer in an unrealistic situation. Using you doctor example, it would be like asking a doctor to prove their medical skills by performing a microtia repair on a banana using a bra and a bouncy house. Fun, of course, but completely irrelevant. 3. They are the sign of an unskilled interviewer. Personally, I have no interest in practicing to master the impractical, irrelevant, and incompetent whiteboard question skill when I can simply go interview with a company who knows how to conduct an effective interview. Maybe the prestige of working at Google or Microsoft is worth it to people to slog their way through those kinds of interviews. Personally, I went through Microsoft's interview process and ended up working there for over a year. I've had better jobs and I still think their interview process is retarded. I certainly wouldn't put myself through it again.

LordHumungous 11y ago
> They demonstrate that they have a medical degree, have completed their residency, have passed their boards, and then provide proof of prior work experience. Oh, you mean that's all they have to do? If you think being judged by a whiteboard problem is arbitrary, imagine being judged by your score on a fill in the bubble boards exam. And even after getting their degree and passing the boards, doctors still have to go through an interview that would make the average programmer cry. I worked directly with doctors for several years, and almost tried to become one myself. The shit they have to deal with is on a whole other order of magnitude from anything programmers go through.
- innocentoldguy 11y ago
  I have worked with surgeons and anesthesiologists for the last 12 years, so I know what they have to do as well. One important thing to keep in mind is that a surgeon or anesthesiologist is taking their patients' health, and even their lives, into their hands when they operate. I've written code for 25 years and nobody's life has ever been at stake. Furthermore, when something is stupid and a waste of time, it should be discussed, dealt with, and eliminated; regardless of how many other stupid things exist in life.