5 ms·

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure where they've interviewed or read about interviewing. I guess Google and Microsoft might run interviews like that, but I've never h

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure where they've interviewed or read about interviewing. I guess Google and Microsoft might run interviews like that, but I've never had that experience. And I've interviewed in a lot of places (both in Silicon Valley and out of it!). It seems like maybe they've spent too much time on HN and Reddit reading about interviewing without doing it. ;)

plorkyeran 11y ago
I've never interviewed with Google, but when I interviewed at Microsoft I had a single interviewer (of five) ask me to write code on a whiteboard, and it was a total of ten lines or so.
Blackthorn 11y ago
I've proctored a number of interviews for $BIG_COMPANY and they wanted whiteboard coding (yuck), so I made sure that my questions involved the whiteboard but zero coding. Without revealing my own secret interviewing sauce, I take people through an area that most software engineers use but are highly unfamiliar with: the linking and loading process. It works because it's such a black box with most people. I have them figure out how they would write a linker and loader. The people who score well with me never really thought about it before, but with a bit of guidance come up with a pretty reasonable facsimile of what such a system looks like for real. Then I interviewed at a bunch of places. Most of them were fairly small and they universally used whiteboard coding, except when I interviewed for a specific team at $OTHER_BIG_COMPANY and didn't touch a whiteboard at all. I expect that if I wasn't interviewing for a specific team, I'd have had to use the whiteboard. So yeah, sadly IME whiteboard coding is alive and well.
- danellis 11y ago
  > Without revealing my own secret interviewing sauce Why is it a secret?
  - zzalpha 11y ago
    To be fair, an interview process that's novel and successful is certainly a competitive advantage, at least in companies where they understand their engineers are key to their success and not simply cogs in a machine.
    - danellis 11y ago
      > an interview process that's novel and successful is certainly a competitive advantage That's true, but... it's pretty sad that it's true. There's so much to be learned from good interviewing practices.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

plorkyeran 11y ago

I've never interviewed with Google, but when I interviewed at Microsoft I had a single interviewer (of five) ask me to write code on a whiteboard, and it was a total of ten lines or so.

Blackthorn 11y ago

I've proctored a number of interviews for $BIG_COMPANY and they wanted whiteboard coding (yuck), so I made sure that my questions involved the whiteboard but zero coding. Without revealing my own secret interviewing sauce, I take people through an area that most software engineers use but are highly unfamiliar with: the linking and loading process. It works because it's such a black box with most people. I have them figure out how they would write a linker and loader. The people who score well with me never really thought about it before, but with a bit of guidance come up with a pretty reasonable facsimile of what such a system looks like for real. Then I interviewed at a bunch of places. Most of them were fairly small and they universally used whiteboard coding, except when I interviewed for a specific team at $OTHER_BIG_COMPANY and didn't touch a whiteboard at all. I expect that if I wasn't interviewing for a specific team, I'd have had to use the whiteboard. So yeah, sadly IME whiteboard coding is alive and well.

danellis 11y ago
> Without revealing my own secret interviewing sauce Why is it a secret?
- zzalpha 11y ago
  To be fair, an interview process that's novel and successful is certainly a competitive advantage, at least in companies where they understand their engineers are key to their success and not simply cogs in a machine.
  - danellis 11y ago
    > an interview process that's novel and successful is certainly a competitive advantage That's true, but... it's pretty sad that it's true. There's so much to be learned from good interviewing practices.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]