Hacker News Reader

Comment by zbobet2012 | Hacker News Reader

zbobet2012·

I think it's worse than a whiteboard. I have seen very few interviews that expected anything other than psuedo code on a whiteboard.

With a repl I could easily pin myself on some trivial bug that interviewers would ignore on the whiteboard...

View on HN

I thought I disliked whiteboard coding, until I recently had an interview on a provided laptop running one of those JavaScript IDEs. It was miserable. Extreme unusable OS X mouse acceleration, an awful keyboard, an unfamiliar hotkey setup in the text editor, and a tiny 11 inch monitor split into 4 sections which means my editor was maybe 10 lines tall. I failed miserably at a relatively short and simple challenge that I am confident I could code on a remotely familiar and sane computer setup. Heck, I would have preferred writing valid JavaScript on a whiteboard. At least I'd be able to see a lot more lines at a time, which it turns out is pretty important for my ability to code.

Sounds like a company to avoid if they throw the improper tool for the job at you and expect you to do it with that, even if a pen & paper would be better.

</slightly offtopic>

Some guys I've met, with different occupations and age, sincerely believe that smaller screens are more usable. Like small windows on 14" CRT when everyone had 17/19". Now it's guys that claim that 11-13" ultrabook is enough for them and they don't want more ever. This honestly baffles me every time.

I use only a small part of screen when writing code, because it somehow forces me to write shorter, cleaner functions. Although debugging is terrible experience on small monitors, because I need more windows open at the same time - watches, callstacks, ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com