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Comment by hota_mazi | Hacker News Reader

Instead of this subjective us/them mentality, I'd be more interested in some hard data showing that not using a white board leads to higher quality hires. I'm really not convinced this is the case.

Besides, that list is not what the title is. It's a list of companies that don't do brain teasers. But a lot of them use white boards.

And to be honest, using a white board is important. You will be doing that a lot in any kind of developer capacity, especially the more senior ones. You need to be able to explain things clearly on a white board.

Factoring this in the interview process is a plus, not a minus in my opinion.

But we can all agree that questions should be about writing code, not brain teasers. This has been a well accepted idea for more than ten years.

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> It's a list of companies that don't do brain teasers

Facebook, Google, Apple, LinkedIn, Netflix, etc don't do brain teasers and they're not on this list.

EDIT: whoops, Netflix is on this list, my bad

While the term isn’t very precise, in this context “brainteaser” means precisely the kind of questions asked by Google, etc.

Mmmh, no, I don't think so.

Brain teasers are typically understood as questions such as "How many ping pong balls can you put into an airplane?", and other silly, non-coding related questions.

This type of question has been banned in most tech companies for years.

Given that you are the one who used the term, I’m curious why you used it in the way I described then and not the way you just did. The article here clearly is including LeetCode style questions as “whiteboard questions” — this is explicitly stated. Maybe you hadn’t read the article? That is fairly likely, given that your comments about physical whiteboards are addressed in the article as well.

That's a Fermi problem, not a brain teaser. Brain teasers are problem with one solution that you solve by a spark of insight (or memory) with no solving process.

Serious question, because I see this view all the time: how are the algorithms design, architecture, and coding questions asked by Google and friends brain teasers?

They tend to be contrived, artificial, aggressively timeboxed, unrealistically isolated from normal tools one might use, and the desired solution tends to be one that depends on having one or two central creative insights.

Whether they’re a good or bad interviewing technique is a separate topic — I only mean to describe the usage of the term as I’ve seen it in the last 5-10 years.

(Also, to be clear, not every question asked by Google necessarily falls into this category. System design questions in particular tend not to.)

Netflix is in the list.

I'm curious to know what are the biggest companies on the GitHub list. It looks like some of these methods may work fine for a company hiring a dozen people a year, but when you're a large tech company (like your list), hiring 10,000 people a year and interviewing probably 50-100x that, you need a method that scales up and is more cheat proof.

I've easily spent more time at whiteboar in interviews than at a white hard in all my time on the actual job, over many years.

A good design discussion is written up and discussed. Ad hoc scribbles on a board don't add much anything, not in the 21st century with good computer drawing tools

There's stages.

I get a lot of work done at a white hard with 1-3 coworkers. We reach a consensus there, and then you formalize and write up the design and break out lucidchart or whatever.

It's not worth spending time making a design when you're going to forget something important and have to rework it. Use a whiteboard until you're confident you aren't going to erase again, that's my rule.

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