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Comment by runlevel1 | Hacker News Reader

Do people hate whiteboarding in general or the questions they're being asked to draw?

I can fully understand dislike for puzzles and being asked to implement irrelevant algorithms in pseudo code. The interview should reflect the job being interviewed for.

I've found whiteboarding to be mutually helpful in questions about system architecture. Plus, it's something that we actually do on-the-job.

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Yes, but you don't write what you expect to be fully functional code on a whiteboard. A whiteboard is good for sharing ideas. Using it to write and assess code is pretty stupid if you step back and think about it.

I mean ask yourself this: do you ever use the whiteboard to write code to the extent you expect some poor kid trying to get his first job to do? Hell no, you screen share an IDE or paste code in an email.

People used to have to write code on paper (I did this a few times in college ages ago) and that comes from the cost of compiling stuff way back when. Computing time is friggin cheap, that's why no one does it. To expect some new guy to be adept at that ancient practice is silly.

I agree. This is a form of the psychological concept of encoding specificity principle[1] which states that recall is most effective when the conditions at the time of encoding match the conditions at the time of retrieval.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encoding_specificity_principle

For example, what does the ability to reverse an AVL tree on the whiteboard have to do with doing UI design in XAML?

UI Design or a Frontend Software Engineer? I'd expect people working on the frontend to just as proficient in time complexity, space complexity, and performance analysis as a backend engineer. I don't particularly gravitate towards companies working in CRUD apps, but single page applications with complex UI flows and data collection can certainly need those abilities. For one, it's not particularly uncommon to have an actual tree in the UI. How would you represent that tree? How are you going to handle it as it grows to thousands of nodes?

I think few frontend developers would consider the work they do to be "UI design".

Full stack development, desktop, mobile and Web.

A UI tree component is not an AVL tree, plus most shops just stick with whatever comes with the framework, or buy some stuff like DevExpress toolbox.

Also UI knowledge requires design skills and knowing what the stack is capable of, not CS bingo about stuff I haven't used in 20 years.

I can dust off my data structures and algorithms CS book if I ever need to implement one.

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