Hacker News Reader

Comment by rabble | Hacker News Reader

If an org does WBI's then it's a good indication that they are not choosing the best applicants. Instead of either getting good at them or trying to get the industry to change, we should embrace this.

If they do WBI's then they probably do lots of other things which run counter to best practices. Isn't it so much better to expose to the outside world a culture of cargo culting inability to evaluate techniques for the efficacy.

There are so many orgs who do run themselves well. The real tricky party is how to determine that quickly. With WBI's we can get a short cut.

Long Live The White Board Interview!

View on HN

>If an org does WBI's then it's a good indication that they are not choosing the best applicants

I don't think the data supports this. Say what you will about Google, but they do WBIs and the average quality of their engineers is very very high. Same with FB.

How would you hire?

I'd like to agree with you but my current gig involved a WBI and the company itself actually has stellar software development processes and tools. It might just have been that the hiring manager wasn't too comfy doing it any other way, but in any case it did not correlate strongly to the culture inside the company.

Perhaps use it as a warning sign, but you might want to talk to your potential co-workers as well and see what they're actually doing and how.

I don't get the hatred towards white boarding during interviews. That's exactly what I do when brainstorming design, general architecture, state machines, explaining data structures used etc. The use of white board in an interview also covers the same topics, when I'm interviewing candidates.

Now if you say whiteboard programming, and that the candidate has to pay attention to curly braces and semicolons and typos, then I agree its not a great process.

So for me, whiteboard interviewing is perfectly fine, whiteboard programming is not.

> If they do WBI's then they probably do lots of other things which run counter to best practices.

And what are the best practices for interviewing? Whiteboard interviews are employed by plenty of successful software companies (Google, Facebook etc), "best practices" implies there is something clearly accepted as more effective that they should be using instead. What is it?

How do you suggest people hire for general programming positions?

How would you hire?

Conversation, half technical and half to figure out what the person would be like to work with. For example, tell me about the most interesting/difficult/satisfying problem was that you've worked on. Or, tell me what happens when you point your browser at a web site, in as much detail as you can muster. What are your go-to tools to solve problems

Mostly pair-programming coding session on site or homework that is later discussed and "developed" on site. Candidate picks which option works best for her.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com