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Whiteboard or not, in any interview, you are judged relative to performance of other candidates. At very coveted places like FB, they don't have a dearth of can
by soham 11y ago
Whiteboard or not, in any interview, you are judged relative to performance of other candidates. At very coveted places like FB, they don't have a dearth of candidates. i.e. Even if you did "good enough", very likely they'll find someone who "aced" the same question on the whiteboard. (We're not debating whether that's right judgment or not, but from their perspective, it's justifiable).
Having said that, I believe that your hunch is also correct viz. tech interviews for core roles at good companies these days, are more competitive than ever. Compared to say 10-15 years ago, the variety of interview problems is higher, complexity of software has increased, and the value of an engineer is understood to be higher ($Millions in equity). All that is contributing to moving of the goal post.
(Source: several years of doing this, now running an interview training course for a living http://InterviewKickstart.com http://InterviewKickstart.com).
- EliRivers 11y agothe value of an engineer is understood to be higher ($Millions in equity) This would be at hip, happening startups in which you take a gamble on awful pay and terrible hours in the hope of being the unicorn, is it? Because in the vast majority of coding jobs, you're not worth millions.
- soham 11y agoValue is always relative to supply and demand. Case in point: elementary school teachers are far more valuable, but they are still paid peanuts because there are so many of them. Engineers who can work on large scale systems in the backend and frontend are not that many. And hence they are valued higher. (I'm not talking about commoditized skills like making webpages and configuring systems, which are indeed vast majority of software jobs). How many hours you spend is a very good question, but it's a separate question from supply and demand (aka value) of core engineers.
- IndianAstronaut 11y agoEven at my small CRUD software company, there are 8 devs for a company bringing in $14million a year in revenue. That is certainly skirting the million range.
- EliRivers 11y agoHow many secretaries are there? By this reasoning, if there's one secretary, that secretary is worth millions.
- werber 11y agogood point!
- davelnewton 11y agoAnd if they're any good, they probably are.
- olso 11y agoCare to share the company?