6 ms·

White board interviews are humiliating, especially if the level is pitched wrong. As someone with a career prior to starting grad school I'm sick of being treat

White board interviews are humiliating, especially if the level is pitched wrong. As someone with a career prior to starting grad school I'm sick of being treated like a child in the interview process and being given diddly little graph traversal problems when I used to building entire systems. The problem here is a mismatch in expectations. But the whiteboard interview does have its merits. I have sat on the other side of that table. We took a candidate with years of experience a masters degree from a prestigious university and a very very impressive thesis. We were almost embarrassed to give him the warm up questions. Until he completely utterly failed to complete them. We didn't even get past the warm up questions during the two hour interview. As a baseline measure of competence, it was a pretty good one and we (in a small startup) really dodged a bullet by doing this kind of testing.

brianwawok 10y ago
Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps you missed genius coders who suck at white board fizzbuzz.
- deadgrey19 10y ago
  I won't give away the details, but the warm-up question should have taken a about 14 seconds for someone with the claimed skill set. They should have been able to speak the code at us rather than use a whiteboard. Think of something like "write a program to sum the values in a 10 element integer array". It was supposed to be a fluff filter so we could get on to higher level architecture/design questions. I felt embarrassed to even give it. On resume alone, this guy was a definite hire. The interview was something else entirely.
  - kasey_junk 10y ago
    I know great coders that have failed fizzbuzz. I've seen it happen in an interview where I was an interviewer, they were my friend, and I did everything in my power to make the process low pressure. Some people just can't deal with the pressure of interviewing.
AnimalMuppet 10y ago
> White board interviews are humiliating, especially if the level is pitched wrong. As someone with a career prior to starting grad school I'm sick of being treated like a child in the interview process and being given diddly little graph traversal problems when I used to building entire systems. White board interviews are humiliating? Why? Because your sense of pride says that you're better than that? Is your sense of pride going to decide it's humiliating if I ask you to work on a crappy little side project for a month? And, you're used to building entire systems? Great. In our interview process, we've got maybe half an hour for this kind of problem. Are you going to build an entire real system for us in half an hour? If so, I definitely want to hire you. But if not (as I suspect), then toy problems are kind of all we've got to see how you interact with a problem. > The problem here is a mismatch in expectations. Very much so. You expect the interview to be at the level that you work at, and we don't have time to lay the shared foundation to see how you really operate at that level. If we tried, the interview would be a week, not two hours. We don't have time for that, even if you do.
- deadgrey19 10y ago
  Being asked to write yet another depth first search implementation (honestly, 5/5 interviews at a large corporation were the same question) that any second year student can do is humiliating when your daily bread is building complex distributed systems. I still did it, because (unlike the writer) I understand that you do need to establish a baseline. As I've said, I've sat on the other side of the table, asked the humiliating question and seen the candidate fail miserably. It's a necessary evil, but it's still humiliating. A less humiliating but still valuable interview (IMHO) is a systems design question. It should still be a whiteboard exercise, but it's a better test of problem solving and engineering skills. I don't seriously begin any system work without first doing the very same thing on a whiteboard myself. It's a useful on the job skill and a useful way to test skills of communication and collaboration in describing the solution. With respect, if you're putting your employees to work on "crapy little side project's" for a month, either the projects are not crappy and have potentially large impact on the firm, or, you're wasting valuable resources.
  - 10y ago

brianwawok 10y ago

Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps you missed genius coders who suck at white board fizzbuzz.

deadgrey19 10y ago
I won't give away the details, but the warm-up question should have taken a about 14 seconds for someone with the claimed skill set. They should have been able to speak the code at us rather than use a whiteboard. Think of something like "write a program to sum the values in a 10 element integer array". It was supposed to be a fluff filter so we could get on to higher level architecture/design questions. I felt embarrassed to even give it. On resume alone, this guy was a definite hire. The interview was something else entirely.
- kasey_junk 10y ago
  I know great coders that have failed fizzbuzz. I've seen it happen in an interview where I was an interviewer, they were my friend, and I did everything in my power to make the process low pressure. Some people just can't deal with the pressure of interviewing.

AnimalMuppet 10y ago

> White board interviews are humiliating, especially if the level is pitched wrong. As someone with a career prior to starting grad school I'm sick of being treated like a child in the interview process and being given diddly little graph traversal problems when I used to building entire systems. White board interviews are humiliating? Why? Because your sense of pride says that you're better than that? Is your sense of pride going to decide it's humiliating if I ask you to work on a crappy little side project for a month? And, you're used to building entire systems? Great. In our interview process, we've got maybe half an hour for this kind of problem. Are you going to build an entire real system for us in half an hour? If so, I definitely want to hire you. But if not (as I suspect), then toy problems are kind of all we've got to see how you interact with a problem. > The problem here is a mismatch in expectations. Very much so. You expect the interview to be at the level that you work at, and we don't have time to lay the shared foundation to see how you really operate at that level. If we tried, the interview would be a week, not two hours. We don't have time for that, even if you do.

deadgrey19 10y ago
Being asked to write yet another depth first search implementation (honestly, 5/5 interviews at a large corporation were the same question) that any second year student can do is humiliating when your daily bread is building complex distributed systems. I still did it, because (unlike the writer) I understand that you do need to establish a baseline. As I've said, I've sat on the other side of the table, asked the humiliating question and seen the candidate fail miserably. It's a necessary evil, but it's still humiliating. A less humiliating but still valuable interview (IMHO) is a systems design question. It should still be a whiteboard exercise, but it's a better test of problem solving and engineering skills. I don't seriously begin any system work without first doing the very same thing on a whiteboard myself. It's a useful on the job skill and a useful way to test skills of communication and collaboration in describing the solution. With respect, if you're putting your employees to work on "crapy little side project's" for a month, either the projects are not crappy and have potentially large impact on the firm, or, you're wasting valuable resources.
- 10y ago