<story><title>A listing of companies that don&apos;t do whiteboard job interviews</title><url>https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acslater00</author><text>I ask most candidates to write code on a whiteboard in front of me and I’m not apologizing for it!&lt;p&gt;The problem is usually fairly easy and if the candidate cannot get to a “describe solution in words” milestone then I will guide them to one. After that I ask them to write code. I will also tell them “the code is the part I care about”.&lt;p&gt;The specific competency I am evaluating here is “can you turn thoughts into code”. I repeat that phrase in interview training so much I think people make fun of me for it.&lt;p&gt;Imagine I give you a python list with 100 elements and I ask you to write code that will find all instances of the number “5” and move them to the front of the list. I don’t care about performance.&lt;p&gt;You know you have to write a loop and whenever you see a 5, remove it and put it at the front. Easy. Not even really an “algorithm”. Some people can make code happen very easily and accurately. But some people really need to really think about it - what control flow to use, off by one errors, bounds issues - and make mistakes. Some people don’t see their own bugs. Some people do weird stuff that makes me think they haven’t seen a lot of code before.&lt;p&gt;I teach interviewers to evaluate the act of the writing as much as the end product, kind of like when airport security asks you “where did you stay in New York” and doesn’t really care about the answer so much as how shifty you look when answering it. It doesn’t mean you have to materialize perfect code on the board to pass - not even close! But this exercise provides information, and when other exercises corroborate that information we use it to make a hire&amp;#x2F;nohire decision.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, bottom line is whiteboard code is a completely reasonable technique to deploy in an interview setting and if you do this you shouldn’t feel bad about it. Much more depends on (a) whether the interviewer is trained and calibrated and (b) whether the company knows what it is even trying to evaluate than the question format.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pmikesell</author><text>Thank you for writing this post. Whiteboard code interviews get a lot of hate on HN and I suspect that folks who have come to rely on them for part of their hiring signal have simply stopped posting.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve done a lot of lower level systems work and the fact is that even with a long career and history of very successful product I get whiteboard coding interviews when I look for a job ... and it&amp;#x27;s just fine. Yes it&amp;#x27;s not the same as day to day work, but it&amp;#x27;s related, and I have to admit that I find them kind of fun.&lt;p&gt;Maybe there are 2 types of &amp;quot;programming jobs&amp;quot;: 1) you will have to implement data structures and algorithms, or 2) everything will be provided for you in a language or framework. For job type 2) CS is not needed - it&amp;#x27;s not a computer science related position ... it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;frameworking&amp;quot;. I&amp;#x27;m guessing that a lot of the whiteboard hate comes from type 2) people applying for type 1) jobs, OR type 2) companies asking type 1) questions.&lt;p&gt;For more history around whiteboard coding, there&amp;#x27;s the excellent &amp;quot;Why Can&amp;#x27;t Programmers Program&amp;quot; post: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&amp;#x2F;why-cant-programmers-program&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&amp;#x2F;why-cant-programmers-program&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I would like to actually figure out what is the bet way to do interviewing for coding positions but it&amp;#x27;s super hard to actually have these kinds of discussions on HN now without people getting upset at even suggesting whiteboard coding interviews.</text></comment>
<story><title>A listing of companies that don&apos;t do whiteboard job interviews</title><url>https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acslater00</author><text>I ask most candidates to write code on a whiteboard in front of me and I’m not apologizing for it!&lt;p&gt;The problem is usually fairly easy and if the candidate cannot get to a “describe solution in words” milestone then I will guide them to one. After that I ask them to write code. I will also tell them “the code is the part I care about”.&lt;p&gt;The specific competency I am evaluating here is “can you turn thoughts into code”. I repeat that phrase in interview training so much I think people make fun of me for it.&lt;p&gt;Imagine I give you a python list with 100 elements and I ask you to write code that will find all instances of the number “5” and move them to the front of the list. I don’t care about performance.&lt;p&gt;You know you have to write a loop and whenever you see a 5, remove it and put it at the front. Easy. Not even really an “algorithm”. Some people can make code happen very easily and accurately. But some people really need to really think about it - what control flow to use, off by one errors, bounds issues - and make mistakes. Some people don’t see their own bugs. Some people do weird stuff that makes me think they haven’t seen a lot of code before.&lt;p&gt;I teach interviewers to evaluate the act of the writing as much as the end product, kind of like when airport security asks you “where did you stay in New York” and doesn’t really care about the answer so much as how shifty you look when answering it. It doesn’t mean you have to materialize perfect code on the board to pass - not even close! But this exercise provides information, and when other exercises corroborate that information we use it to make a hire&amp;#x2F;nohire decision.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, bottom line is whiteboard code is a completely reasonable technique to deploy in an interview setting and if you do this you shouldn’t feel bad about it. Much more depends on (a) whether the interviewer is trained and calibrated and (b) whether the company knows what it is even trying to evaluate than the question format.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ummonk</author><text>If you&amp;#x27;re testing for their coding process, why do you make them write it out on a whiteboard? Why not provide them a code editor or at least text editor?&lt;p&gt;I like whiteboard interviews, but they should be testing high level design (&amp;quot;describe solution in words &amp;#x2F; detail in pseudocode&amp;quot;), not coding skills.</text></comment>