<story><title>Whiteboard interviews are a test of obedience, not intelligence</title><url>https://ashgw.me/blog/white-board-interviews</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tedunangst</author><text>This will be shocking, but honestly, the point of asking someone to code up fizzbuzz on the whiteboard is not sifting for obedient slaves. Hand to god, chop down the cherry tree, no lie.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zaptheimpaler</author><text>It isn&amp;#x27;t if the problem is FizzBuzz or a slightly more challenging and realistic problem. When its 1-2 leetcode hards in 45 minutes that can only be solved by having done hundreds of those problems, it does seem the purpose is more to just gauge how many such problems you&amp;#x27;ve spent time grinding on before even though they have very little relevance to programming.</text></comment>
<story><title>Whiteboard interviews are a test of obedience, not intelligence</title><url>https://ashgw.me/blog/white-board-interviews</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tedunangst</author><text>This will be shocking, but honestly, the point of asking someone to code up fizzbuzz on the whiteboard is not sifting for obedient slaves. Hand to god, chop down the cherry tree, no lie.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kristjansson</author><text>Whiteboard questions are great, if the question is like two orders of magnitude simpler than the day to day. At that point you’re answering “has this person seen a computer before, and are they able to do the simplest possible task?”. Which I think your experience has also shown, can be a live question for far more candidates than one would expect.&lt;p&gt;The problems come when a company overestimates that threshold, either by selecting too hard a task, or believing their work requires more than it does. Then the question selects for (a) savants and (b) people who study for interviews. Unsurprisingly (b)s outnumber (a)s, and then get pissed when they realize how disconnected the material they studied is from the job, and write things like TFA.</text></comment>