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gedy

"Whiteboard hazing" is the most apt description I've heard it called. Pass the wringer, you can join the club.

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11247773 and marked it off-topic.

Okay sure, though how is it off topic?

The subthread turned into a flamewar.

The root comment wasn't off-topic, but it wasn't helpful either, because of the snarky second sentence. It's typical for such a comment to nudge the thread in the wrong direction.

i often just refer to it as waterboarding.

whiterboarding?

I just call it "whiteboarding".

Seems to convey the subjective experience quite aptly.

Have you ever been waterboarded? Putting waterboarding on the same level as whiteboard coding interviews is minimizing the horrific experience of those who have been waterboarded.

Not many people have been waterboarded, and most were terrorists, so it's not the same as a holocaust joke. In a world where we're not allowed to laugh at anything connected to some kind of injustice, then yes, that wasn't funny.

But I laughed.

>and most were terrorists

Do you have a source on this?

Putting waterboarding on the same level as whiteboard coding interviews is minimizing the horrific experience of those who have been waterboarded.

I guess it is, if you read it literally. But I don't think people mean it literally when they joke about it, nor are they making a serious comparison between the two experiences.

ok sure, but this conversation is figurative not literal. it would be horribly wrong to literally put whiteboarding on the same level as waterboarding. I don't see any problem with using figurative language and expressive metaphors to help convey a particular emotion felt about something that is common to the lives of those participating in the conversation.

I think they really downplay how much of a panic/anxiety these type of closed room with no ventiliation with solemn looking people judging your every move.

I could never calm down and think but the interviewers wanted to test how you would code on a whiteboard under duress

Its good to see how people handle stress. You can weed out a lot of crybabies by analyzing their performance under pressure, regardless of whether they produce the "right answer".

Social performance stress is not technical performance stress. You can weed out a lot of undesirable work environments by seeing which potential employers confuse them.

This is not how to find people you actually want to work with.

On the bright side, it's how you find people you want to work for.

Maybe - but I've also seen folks who ace that sort of thing be the worst engineers for getting real work done "under pressure", and fiddle around with reinventing the wheel and academic debates about trivial details too.

Is this seriously what interviews are trying to discover? In what practical situation would this skill manifest - a meteor is about to hit the Earth, and you need to write some algorithm to stop it RIGHT NOW?

Or is it "we need to know how you handle the stress of critical bugs that are existential threats to our client relationships", which shouldn't exist in the first place if the company is run well? If yes then I guess you know what I'd say next...

you sound like a terrible boss

Thankfully I'm not a boss. But when I go to an interview and they put me under pressure, I dont automatically discount them because they put me in an uncomfortable situation. I assume they're gauging my mettle.

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