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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 ze
by 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 agoTo 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]