Um... just saying this doesn't make it true.

I guess I'm also skeptical of this claim that people that can't concentrate and get distracted easily aren't just as effected by this in their day-to-day work. But I also don't see how a whiteboard is different than a pair programming for this particular problem.

I don't actually like whiteboard interviews. But like I said above, most alternatives aren't workable.

I would disagree here - my sense is that the harder your technical interview is relative to other processes, the more you select for CS nerds, desperate immigrants and highly motivated tryhards. As you lower your technical rigor, assuming you're still an attractive place, my honest feeling is that looks, cultural fit and paper credentials become more important and you become more homogenous on that dimension. There are a lot of hip startups that are full of cool, attractive 20-somethings from prestigious schools that aren't particularly good at coding.

We have to distinguish between a competitive situation and a non-competitive situation. If they will take anyone, then you only have self-selection. But if it's a competitive situation, a job that a lot of people want, they will have to use some criteria - if it's not coding it's going to have to be something else. So all other bullshit you don't like becomes much more important. Their idea of what would look desirable to others becomes substantially more important.

I really think your beef is not with the coding interview but the notion of having to compete with lots of people for a job. But that's how the world works - the more desirable something is, the more competition you will have - and you (and other minorities that aren't prioritized as underrepresented) are substantially more likely to pass an objective coding interview than a popularity contest.

Sure it does. I gave an example - the like widget. It's just as easy to come up with some task to pair program as it is to come up with complicated whiteboard questions. And takes the same amount of time to administer (assume one dev per pair instead of 2 or 3 devs in a 1-hour whiteboard session).


Well I've always gotten distracted easily. But programming gets me into flow state - which is why it's the perfect job for me.

But you seriously don't get that the stage fright and ticking clock aspect of a bunch of rapid-fire whiteboard brain teasers is different than letting someone get comfortable and pair program one on one?

When you hire a new person - you basically know within a week or two if they're any good. At least with programming where you can't fake it very long. I'm just looking for the best way to simulate that. I don't believe it's whiteboard at all. I think pair programming is closer. Homework is a little better but has problems. Short contract is by far the best but may not always work out.

Lol i kind of dress like that pic you posted suzzer. Didnt really think about it much.

Please dont psychoanalyze me

Unless you pass the coding interview and still fail the cultural interview - which is literally a popularity contest.

This may be true but in my (limited) experience, any company that is touting how many of their devs or management are from big-ex-FAANGS look like complete shitshows to work for.

On the other side, probably the best job I ever had was at a company that, when google (initially) closed their Austin dev office, quietly hired a bunch of them. They never trumpeted "look how many googlers we have!" but if you asked around you'd realize that they did. Their hiring standards were really good, and it was so great to work there.

You're so money and you don't even know it dude. You got these claws and you don't even know what to do with them. Just a straight shooter with upper management written all over you.

Also how's your sneaker game? Post a pic.

Getting a bunch of ex-googlers because they closed an Austin office makes infinitely more sense to me.

Btw I can't remember if any startups that I interviewed bragged about ex-FAANGs working there. I think it was a couple of articles I read where the CEO of some hot new company would brag about how many they had.

The only one I remember for sure was the Chinese electric car company that very clearly had no idea what they were doing. Some woman manager introduced herself as ex-Amazon in my interview. Ooooh.

Does anyone have experience working for a non-tech company as a tech role? I know you do suzzer, obviously. How does it compare to working for a tech company?

I feel like you'd avoid those whiteboard type of interviews in those companies, or maybe the inverse would happen because they think that's the proper way to conduct a programming interview.

I do think whiteboard interviews have their place - as a manager, I would think that thinking quickly under pressure is a valuable trait in a candidate, when you're up against tight deadlines this ability really shines. I don't think it should be the only metric in which a candidate's ability is tested. I think that's stupid.

Dude there's absolutely no correlation between a deadline crunch and timed whiteboard grilling. No one comes up to you in crunch time and says "We need an answer to which type of inheritance to use in 30 seconds or the project is doomed!"

No one thinks that's an important part of the job - they just discount the stage fright aspect of it. Maybe it comes in more when you feel you're already at a disadvantage (minority, old) and think you have to just nail this thing in no time. Once I started worrying about that my whiteboarding went in the shitter. It's not fun to have those thoughts swirling around in your head when you're trying to figure out how to code how much water some weird tetris thing will hold.

We did some whiteboarding at the non-tech companies. But it was pretty mellow. Although still - we may have missed out on that one dev, and who knows maybe others, who just panicked and couldn't think straight in the moment. I didn't even realize it at the time. I had to live it from the other side.

I guess I never was that great at it even when I was young. I remember one interview I muddled through, then emailed the full solution when I got home and had time to think about it. I did get that job. Did I mention I was younger then?

You all know the classic example right - Einstein flunked out or whatever because he had to think about things for so long? I'd much rather have a dev/lead/architect say "Let me think about this design for a day or two, it's important." vs. just go off half-cocked with the first solution that pops into their head. And I've worked with plenty of those kinds of devs. They get married to their first idea.

Most top tech companies don't do a cultural interview for engineers though. Again, you're competing against the others. If you fix the bar / desirability of a company, the more your emphasize coding (and system design or whatever) the more you have to deemphasize the others and vice versa - somebody has get through, just not that many. So assuming technical skills are your strengths, you should prefer places that test those rigorously, even if you have to prepare for them. Conversely, if a place that is otherwise a desirable place to work is letting people through without testing them rigorously on technical matters, there almost certainly are other filters in place and I don't think you would do very well on those.

This is such a silly thing to say. Getting people to pass the coding interview is hard enough, you aren’t going to start filtering out people based on how “cool” they act the part.

Unless of course, like the others alluded to, if your technical bar is low enough, you can start filtering out on popularity.

So only Netflix has the cultural interview? Again - I only know what I know.

Seems like a lot of people still think the obsession with 'cultural fit' is a problem though.
https://www.thetalentx.com/why-achie...fit-mentality/

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/repo...ticle37684343/

Maybe the other FAANGs don't have a specific cultural interview - but are you sure it's not part of the process?

Also for the record I understand there is a lot of competition for the FAANGs and they have to find a way to winnow the field. Whiteboarding might not be perfect, but it might be better than any other practical way for them to do so.

My problem is with all the other companies out there who should probably be searching for diamonds in the rough rather than blindly emulating FAANG hiring practices, or fetishizing ex-FAANGs.

Then why even have a cultural interview if you're not going to use it to weed people out?

At least at Netflix, if you fail any part of the interview - they just send you home at that point. My coworker, who's a super nice 40-year-old Mexican guy with a pretty thick accent - made it all the way to the "cultural interview" but didn't get the job.

You tell me what happened.

This is a different process than what I was talking about (and what your link was talking about). A pre-canned pair-programming "question" is going to be more similar to a whiteboard interview than the "find an open-source issue we'll work on together" interview.


Most in-person 'whiteboard' interviews that I've done (or heard about) aren't rapid-fire brain teasers. IMO, its much more likely its a single question, with no hidden 'gotchas', but of sufficient complexity that the interviewer can get a sense of how the person approaches a detailed programming task and that the person can take what they're saying and turn it into code that accurately reflects what they're saying.

So, no, basically I don't see a big meaningful difference between the way most interview coding questions are done and the pair programming approach.

Just to really pile on, its doubtful that Einstein ever failed. And especially not because he had to think about things for too long.

I don't disagree with what you're saying here either. But there are still many times you need to be able to present what you're thinking / answer questions / etc. in real time and concisely.

Triple Post!

Suzzer, I think part of the disagreement here is on what "whiteboard" coding interview actually means.

In my mind it's just a proxy for having a person answer a question with real code. It's almost never about trivia. It's rarely (anymore, imo) about gotcha type questions like the "How do you reverse the linked list using constant memory?" (or whatever that question was).

Ideally the candidate has options between their own personal computer, loaner computer, paper, or whiteboard. The problem should be easy to explain and have multiple approaches for solving. It should have depth or maybe some edge case trickiness. The interviewer should be facilitating and guiding the interviewee through the problem. The interviewer shouldn't be looking for a specific right answer but more evaluating thought process and the ability to translate a solution from words/idea to code accurately. The question should have some open ended aspects where the interviewee has to make their own assumption (and the interviewer should be skilled enough to continue the interview with any reasonable assumption the interviewee makes).

And so on.

https://www.thejournal.ie/life-of-al...06681-Oct2015/

You still get massive points for speed and for thinking outside the box. Brute force slowly-arrived at solutions don't move any needles.

Here's the one I was talking about - given a standard bar graph with no space in-between - write pseudo code to figure out how much water it holds. IE this would hold let's say 2 units of water (ignore the space in between the bars):



Imagine water poured over the top, and the bars are solid but the white space above them holds water (again - ignore the gaps between the bars, they don't exist). So in this graph only the space above the 3rd bar holds water - everything else would run off to the left side. Assume the bars are along a unit grid (so no fine-grained heights) - a block of the grid either has a bar or empty space. Bars must start at the bottom and be contiguous.

Yes I know water doesn't exist in 2D you aspies but just work with me here. Imagine the whole thing is one unit in the Z axis with plexiglass walls on both the front and back (but not side) if that helps you. I probably just confused you more.

Ok go! You have 5 minutes to impress the hell out of me with your elegant visionary solution to this problem. Or at least show me a brute force solution in a reasonable amount of time and not totally fail.

Tick tock mother****er.

It's just a lot of money on the line.

Don't sweat.

You got this.

You're not too old for this ****.

Even though you couldn't remember Taylor Swift's name earlier. But don't think about that now.

You're so money and you don't even know it.

Ok... uh... ****... how much time has gone by already?... this is already not going great... dammit... they're counting the grey hairs in my beard as we speak... maybe I should just shave it?... but then I look fatter... but younger ... hmmm ... **** - FOCUS YOU MORON!!! ...

and now I'm this guy for the rest of the interview:

these problems arent super hard they just require practice. That's a verbatim problem I solved on leetcode recently. Except the problem was, write an algorithm to maximize area between two bars. Pretty much the same thing.

a few weeks ago I couldnt have solved it. Now I probably could in 5-10 mins. Honestly I just had to practice.

The quote you put doesn't seem to be in this link. But, yes, I thought you were referring to the oft-quoted lie that he failed at mathematics. Which he clearly didn't. His failure at the entrance exam (which he was taking younger than his peers) had nothing to do with math / physics or even how "slow he thought". It was a gap in knowledge in other subjects.

Suzzer, without a ton of thought, I think that interview question is fine - as long as its not actually scoped to 5 minutes. I'm not discounting the stress/difficulties of "whiteboard" interviews, but I'm highly skeptical they're not just as real when doing pair programming.

Either way it's going to be up to the interviewer to run the process in a way that is as painless as possible.

I do think this is a clear red flag on why "whiteboard" interviews aren't great.

I just don't see the better option.

I agree it is a red flag - I just am commenting on how these problems really shouldnt be a throw your hands in the air in frustration type of thing.

Right, definitely. I think candy said it earlier, sometimes there’s just a price that has to be paid to get hired. It might or might not be stupid, but here we are.