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As many other parts of an interview, I've always found the blackboard coding session extremely strange. When was the last time you coded in TextEdit with no doc
by hanlec 11y ago
As many other parts of an interview, I've always found the blackboard coding session extremely strange. When was the last time you coded in TextEdit with no docs around, no time to think, standing up, and being watched over the shoulder?
- brianwawok 11y agoI have pseudo-coded on blackboards many times, which is really what a blackboard coding interview should be. If you get a ding for writing .foreach instead of .forEach, that seems a bit picky ;) However I realize I may have a bias as I do ok on most blackboard coding interviews I have done.. maybe been stumped 1 time out of 15 or so in my life? Some of it is a skill, that the more you do the better you get at it, but being good at it does not make you good at actual coding.
- vonmoltke 11y ago> I have pseudo-coded on blackboards many times, which is really what a blackboard coding interview should be. If you get a ding for writing .foreach instead of .forEach, that seems a bit picky ;) In my experience, some interviewers, particularly Amazon interviewers, get really anal about putting correct code on a whiteboard, sheet of paper, or bare text document. I personally do not when giving interviews. My bigger problem, and I seem to depart from the vocal majority on this, is that my preferred normal workflow does not use whiteboards for anything besides task lists and diagrams. In 13 years[1] as an engineer I have never written actual or pseudocode on a whiteboard outside of an interview. I rarely do it on paper. I have never worked with anyone who did this very much, either. [1] Granted, four of those were as an EE, but I still had to deal with code from time to time
- dpark 11y ago> In my experience, some interviewers, particularly Amazon interviewers, get really anal about putting correct code on a whiteboard I had that experience with an Amazon interviewer. The guy who told me he expected perfect code also gave me zero feedback as I worked (despite me literally asking if I was headed in the direction he expected) and spent the entire time staring at his laptop. He'd apparently forgotten that he was scheduled for an interview, and also his manners.
- istorical 11y agoIt's exactly like being good at academic test taking. I'm very good at memorization (of facts, ideas/concepts, and procedures/algorithms) and that allowed me to do well in my younger years and in standardised testing, so I always just scoffed when I heard other people complain about how it was a poor proxy for knowledge / abilities. Of course, now I'm terrible at pretty much all the standard ways of interviewing developers (...here's where you say I'm probably just a bad developer) and now I have all this past-due empathy for those I disregarded before.
- odonnellryan 11y agoI was asked recently by a big company to code some classes in Python, on paper. They then questioned my indentation, syntax, and case-sensitivity multiple times! A valid question, but paper-code?
- brianwawok 11y agoHah that is pretty terrible. In fact, I don't think Python is a very good language to code on paper due to the indentation side of things. Maybe graph paper would help?
- odonnellryan 11y agoMaybe! Or just understand it isn't easy for anyone to indent things on paper haha.
- recursive 11y agoApproximately weekly, when explaining something to another engineer.
- jasonlotito 11y agoWhy don't you give yourself time to think? Why don't you use documentation? Edit: Oh, and how do you version control the white board?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- EliRivers 11y agohow do you version control the white board? We have a magic white board that can print out a big piece of paper showing everything on it. We also take pictures of it (and lesser white boards) to record designs agreed. Those pictures generally get put into a formal design document that is reviewed, signed, approved and all the rest of it.
- giaour 11y agoYou can snap a picture of a filled board with your cell phone.
- jasonlotito 11y agoAnd you put the picture in version control?
- mixmastamyk 11y agoNot often, but I've taken a handwritten diagram and converted it to paths in inkscape, andd cleaned it up a bit. The resulting svg or png can be then added to the docs folder of a project. Works well with sphinx, etc.
- giaour 11y agoThere should be a time stamp in the exif data, so you could track progression from one photo to the next as a very primitive form of version control. My original comment was mostly meant as snark, but I've had an interviewer take photos during a whiteboard exercise for this reason.
- jpeterson 11y agoIn 15 years as a software engineer at companies large and small, I have never seen anyone code on a whiteboard (outside of interviews, anyway), nor have I.
- collyw 11y agoI usually get a pen and paper out if I have something algorithmic to work out.
- nulltype 11y agoTextEdit would be an upgrade. Try inserting lines on a blackboard.