<story><title>Hiring without whiteboards</title><url>https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alexeiz</author><text>When you get stuck, start talking.  You should not be silent at the whiteboard trying to flash out a complete solution all at once.  Talk.  Even if interviewers are not saying anything or ask you any more questions.  There are multiple advantages of talking while writing code at the whiteboard.  Firstly, you show the interviewers the way you think and approach the problem.  It is as important as actually solving the problem.  Secondly, if you get stuck or start making unreasonable assumptions about the problem, the interviewers will have a chance to quickly correct you or give you a hint.  Thirdly, it shows that you can communicate.  Nobody wants to hire a person who can&amp;#x27;t communicate with other people.</text></item><item><author>kelvin0</author><text>Imagine this. You are interviewing for a job, you walk in a room with 2 people who hand you over a sheet with a few problems. They ask you to write the solutions on the whiteboard, while they wait for you to complete.&lt;p&gt;Not a word is said, they are clicking at their laptops, and staring at the whiteboard, as waiting for the genie to pop out of a bottle. All the while your mind is frozen and stuck in a bad loop.&lt;p&gt;This lasts an hour, you are barely able to complete parts of the problems and are frozen. Of course this affects your usually creative and sharp mind.&lt;p&gt;The torture lasts an hour, time&amp;#x27;s up! You shake their hands, as a kiss of death, and head out. As you are walking back, all the answers to all the problems they wanted you to whiteboard, come rushing like a torrent in your mind. Too bad, another &amp;#x27;botched&amp;#x27; technical interview.&lt;p&gt;This is my experience as a battle tested developer who is shipped many products and has been programming for the love of computers since the age of 12 (professionally for more than 15 years). I am not going to be working at Google any time soon (not that a Google job really matters to me).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>meowlicious</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t find talking and thinking at the same time natural. &amp;#x27;Just think out loud&amp;#x27; seems so unnatural to me, I never do it in daily life. I am used to  thinking to deep house music not to interviewers staring at me like hungry wolves. Its hard to communicate with someone who already knows the solution to question because you are thinking together and feeding off of each  others thoughts like in a normal work situation.&lt;p&gt;I think the idea of modern open office is built on the same idea that people would be thinking, communicating and collaborating  at the same time, but I hate open offices for this precise reason.</text></comment>
<story><title>Hiring without whiteboards</title><url>https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alexeiz</author><text>When you get stuck, start talking.  You should not be silent at the whiteboard trying to flash out a complete solution all at once.  Talk.  Even if interviewers are not saying anything or ask you any more questions.  There are multiple advantages of talking while writing code at the whiteboard.  Firstly, you show the interviewers the way you think and approach the problem.  It is as important as actually solving the problem.  Secondly, if you get stuck or start making unreasonable assumptions about the problem, the interviewers will have a chance to quickly correct you or give you a hint.  Thirdly, it shows that you can communicate.  Nobody wants to hire a person who can&amp;#x27;t communicate with other people.</text></item><item><author>kelvin0</author><text>Imagine this. You are interviewing for a job, you walk in a room with 2 people who hand you over a sheet with a few problems. They ask you to write the solutions on the whiteboard, while they wait for you to complete.&lt;p&gt;Not a word is said, they are clicking at their laptops, and staring at the whiteboard, as waiting for the genie to pop out of a bottle. All the while your mind is frozen and stuck in a bad loop.&lt;p&gt;This lasts an hour, you are barely able to complete parts of the problems and are frozen. Of course this affects your usually creative and sharp mind.&lt;p&gt;The torture lasts an hour, time&amp;#x27;s up! You shake their hands, as a kiss of death, and head out. As you are walking back, all the answers to all the problems they wanted you to whiteboard, come rushing like a torrent in your mind. Too bad, another &amp;#x27;botched&amp;#x27; technical interview.&lt;p&gt;This is my experience as a battle tested developer who is shipped many products and has been programming for the love of computers since the age of 12 (professionally for more than 15 years). I am not going to be working at Google any time soon (not that a Google job really matters to me).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andersonmvd</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s a band-aid for an unfixed root cause. Solving problems by talking doesn&amp;#x27;t work for all people. It astonishes me how broken interview processes are. They just need to see if the candidate will be able to do the daily job of a current employee in that position. It&amp;#x27;s that simple. It doesn&amp;#x27;t require whiteboards, puzzles, 10 interviews. Put the candidate to work on a project that you currently facing and see his performance. Doing something other than that is bullshit.</text></comment>