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Comment by bobosha | Hacker News Reader

It amazes me that "..they discovered that many black and Hispanic students, unlike white and Asian ones, had never heard of this type of interview and were unprepared for it..."

How could any programmer worth his/her salt would not know about a whiteboard interview? I think that statement encapsulates it. No only are the schools they are graduating from are woefully inadequate, and they are entering a highly competitive field that with a fast changing landscape that is overwhelming for such grossly underprepared grads.

Ask yourself how come Asians & Jews do so well? They just work harder and push themselves more. I am as bleeding heart a liberal as they come and it pains me to see the lack of diversity, but culture has a huge part to play in it.

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One of my best friends for the past 25 years is a very successful black man - a medical doctor, hospital administrator, and finance nerd. Back when he was in med school, he got arrested in a dormitory laundromat for stealing laundry. Cuffed and kept in jail overnight, because someone else left their socks in his washing machine. That sort of thing just doesn't happen to white medical students. The kind of aggression and neglect he and others like him suffer at the hands of authority is stunning.

As for "They work harder"... consider the impact of multiple generations of success, versus multiple generations of failure. I grew up what southerners call "poor white trash". I escaped, but barely, and mostly because I was very determined and very smart. When I landed at a high quality private college, I was utterly unprepared for the experience. I grew up listening to my father refer to the wealthy men he worked for as "educated mow-rawns", in that thick Kentucky accent of his. Going to college, surrounded by the children of lawyers and professors and the like, their family life was as alien to me as my dad bouncing in and out of jail was to them. I was embarrassed and ashamed.

Now, throw in the past century of crap that has kept even hardworking and talented black families down, and you can see where the problem might start.

well put!!!

> How could any programmer worth his/her salt would not know about a whiteboard interview?

A lot of schools don't teach anything about interviewing. Its not academic. In fact, a lot of the training videos used in schools that do teach "job skills" to prepare students make no mention of white board interviews. They talk about being polite, wearing a suit, grooming, etc.

Judging an academic program on if they have ever been exposed to a whiteboard interview is fairly silly. I never saw on in 20 years.

As to your last paragraph, I'm not sure what role culture would play in introducing people to whiteboard interviews. I guess I grew up in a different environment, but I don't remember any of my urban white friends extolling the annual whiteboard festival. I can see it being a economic function of better schooling though.

Maybe it's changed by now, but I was caught badly off guard by my first technical "interview" (exam) out of college. I thought it would be more or less a normal "interview", the tell me about yourself, your interests, your coursework kind of thing. I was completely unprepared for the whiteboard exam part of the interview, which was in C++ (Java was a brand new thing back then) and involved algorithms and data structures (just a linked list, mainly, but with pointers and so forth thrown in).

I failed it miserably. Honestly, the experience left me kind of embarrassed and metaphorically beaten up for a while. Kind of like I'd claimed to be a programmer and had been revealed to be a fraud.

By this point (almost 20 years later), I've been through this wringer so many times that it seems like common knowledge. It doesn't really bother me at this point. But now that I think of it, yeah, I was unprepared for this and unaware of it.

I'm used to this sort of thing now, but I still think it's an usual and really unpleasant part of our industry. Most knowledge based fields really don't have anything like this sort of interview/exam (seriously, it's almost a pure exam, I think that describing it as an interview is simply misleading to people who aren't aware of what goes on in our field) - though most fields have a more standardized set of credentialing and degree programs.

I do think that the mysterious, unpredictable, and stressful nature of tech exam interviews deters a lot of people from entering or remaining in this field.

> They talk about being polite, wearing a suit, grooming, etc.

Yikes, that's even worse. Some cultures will actively hold a suit against a candidate. I can't say I agree with that, but it's a little scary that they're giving stock advice to a highly dynamic field, very little of which is relevant. (Polite is good, being relaxed is better. Being suited is good, being comfortable is better.)

> Some cultures will actively hold a suit against a candidate.

Most places I've been wouldn't hold this against a new grad.

However, some places might hold this against a more senior person as being tone deaf toward the position he's going to be in. Nevertheless, I might wear a suit if the CEO, CTO, etc. was going to be part of my interview loop. But, I'll probably ditch the jacket and tie for the VP of Engineering.

There are still quite a few places that will reject a candidate out of hand for not wearing a suit. I find that troubling, just as I would find the opposite troubling.

Well, stock advise is basically what text book publishers do.

> There are still quite a few places that will reject a candidate out of hand for not wearing a suit. I find that troubling, just as I would find the opposite troubling.

Agreed, this is an indication of toxic culture on both sides.

HOWEVER. I would say aside from the grooming bit, the whiteboarding advice is the best possible advice for anyone. My mother can happily tell me to wear a suit, but she's not in a position to educate me about my field. A school had better fucking be, or what is the point? The technical knowledge—if they teach it at all—is itself is easier gained online than from a school.

A whiteboard is just a proxy for ability to think on one's feet and problem solve under pressure. It could just as well have been a workstation, a paper and pen....

which aren't taught either in the context of a job interview - watch some of the "amazing", "real life" training videos you can get from book publishers.

if you need to be taught that...then you know the answer.

>How could any programmer worth his/her salt would not know about a whiteboard interview?

These are students. I would not expect them to start their education knowing about whiteboard interviews. At some point, all of us professional software developers were ignorant about how interviewing worked, and then we learned.

The question is: why are black and hispanic students not reaching this level of understanding at the same rate as whites and Asians? Perhaps they're not doing internships at the same rate? Some other reason? Regardless, this question deserves a serious answer, and not a flip dismissal based on stereotypes about work habits.

There was a recent Bloomberg article that really resonated with me when it came to recruiting companies.

High Tech companies rarely recruited at my school (an HBCU) and when they did, they would send some a random manager to talk about diversity, not a recruiter.

>Ask yourself how come Asians & Jews do so well? They just work harder and push themselves more.

Wait, is it that or are the schools "woefully inadequate"??

>No only are the schools they are graduating from are woefully inadequate,

I think that should be further specified. It's not just that culture matters, but cultural expectations and the environment that leads to.

See, I listen to a lot of rap, or "black music". And differences in taste aside, some of the stuff is REALLY complex. Look at Nas, Tupac, or even more recently, Kendrick Lamar. The sheer amount of detail these guys put into their art makes me feel bad about myself as a programmer. These guys work hard at their craft. But you know what, they're not coders.

But here's the thing, quoting Kendrick Lamars "Black Boy Fly": "The only way out the ghetto, you know the stereotype Shooting hoops or live on the stereo like top 40".

The reason why they're not programmers is the same reason why I'm not a rapper. Because I'm white AND asian, and I grew up with a computer instead of a boombox, that my friends coded and didn't rhyme. Not that I don't want to, or that I don't work at it, it's closed doors to me.

I'm fairly certain that black people from the neighbourhoods that I get my music from, walking into a coding interview, even if they've been trying to program for years, they'd be just as lost as me walking into a rap battle. It's not about how hard you work at it, or how hard you push at it. Social mobility takes commitment.

Or succinctly put from the same song " What am I to do when every neighborhood is an obstacle"

"The only way out the ghetto, you know the stereotype Shooting hoops or live on the stereo like top 40".

That really makes me think. 20 years ago Biggie was saying "Either you're slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot." I guess being on Top 40 is an improvement.

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!

Yea the whiteboard comment surprised me a lot. I've never had an interview without it, and/or some kind of take home coding test.

Fwiw, in the past 10 years, I've had 2 whiteboard interviews and the rest I was hired without.

This I really don't understand. All it takes is a simple Google search about "what can I expect in a software interview?" and you'll see right away the importance of whiteboard interviews for so many companies, especially when you are coming out of college. I don't how true the quote actually is, but for anyone, regardless of race, I feel like this is just basic due diligence if you want a job.

I've barely been to any career events at my school, and professors never mention about whiteboard interviews. My friends in CS don't discuss this either. I just learned right away when I did some basic research on job searching.

Your experience seems very weird to me. But I don't have enough data to know if it's atypical. I graduated not too long ago, but my school had many industry veterans as teachers, not pure academics, and sometimes they'd tell stories, one of which included formally proving to an interviewer during a whiteboard interview that the interviewer's expected answer was wrong. Besides that, the school (like I thought many colleges these days) put an emphasis on helping students get hired post-graduation. Additionally students themselves would practice whiteboarding each other, and I occasionally brought it up with friends in rants about how stupid the whiteboard hazing culture is.

Bad students or bad schools, it's really surprising either way they can be that bad.

Have you ever tried working at fast food joint in the summer? You can work hard in the kitchen in KFC and push yourself to work even harder in the hot summer months, but that won't lead you to a better job. Students who work hard at school that does not prepare them for the current working environment, will not fair better either. Hard work and pushing yourself more does not always lead to success.

> Ask yourself how come Asians & Jews do so well? They just work harder and push themselves more.

Wow, talk about broad strokes. I guess I'll refer to you all my slacker asian and jew friends so they can make some easy cash.

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