2 ms·
There are myriad problems with whiteboard questions: 1. The questions are always esoteric and have absolutely nothing to do with the company's business (unless
by innocentoldguy 12y ago
There are myriad problems with whiteboard questions:
1. The questions are always esoteric and have absolutely nothing to do with the company's business (unless, of course, they are in the business of generating Fibonacci numbers or CSS flags).
2. The situation itself is completely unrealistic and in no way demonstrates "how a person thinks" in a programming situation; which is weird since that is, after all, the universal rationalization for asking whiteboard questions in the first place.
3. Most, if not all, interviewers have no idea what to do with the information they observe in a whiteboard situation, so regardless of the result, it just becomes a confirmation of whatever opinion they formed within the first 30 seconds of the interview.
In my experience, whiteboard questions demonstrate a lack of interviewing skills and are a waste of time for everyone involved. I refuse to interview people that way, and I'll walk out of an interview if someone asks me to solve something on a whiteboard. If you want to see my code, go to my Github account. If you want to see how I solve real-world problems, I use past experience, Vim, a debugger, a terminal, my gists, Dash, and Google. There. Did we really have to waste an hour of everyone's lives to get to that answer? Absolutely not!