Enough with whiteboard coding interviews | Hacker News Reader

Enough with whiteboard coding interviews

blog.indextank.com

12 pointsxtacy5 comments

"When you come to an interview with IndexTank, bring your laptop. Be ready to sit down and create working code" - How is that much different from writing code on the white board, maybe I missed the point.

Coding on the whiteboard is something that you never do in real life (unless you're a CS teacher, in which case you're not really making it up). It can throw people for a loop.

Back in the 80s I couldn't write code without a copy of the programming language manual handy. Today I can't code without an internet connection. Asking people to code on the board requires dumbing down the questions to the point that it introduces way too much noise; you can't wait forever while someone tests their code.

If I tell you something like: here's the Twitter API, here's the twitter Ruby gem. Given a Twitter user, give me the most common word in their last 100 tweets. 15 minutes, show me what you got. That tells me much more about your abilities to do something useful than reversing a linked list on the board.

But I do psuedo-code on paper, and that's much the same thing. I'm not saying everyone does so, on paper or elsewhere, but it's just one way that some people think. I would never go as far to say that no one writes code away from a keyboard.

And if you ever are asked to code on a whiteboard ... do it in psuedo code, and see what happens. Maybe the response will help you decide whether you want to work there.

I had a job interview that did almost exactly that, except with Apache Camel. In fact, they chose Apache Camel precisely because it was an API that very few of their applicants had any experience with, and they believed that a software developer should be able to work with a new tool very quickly.

Best, most sensible interview I've ever had.

I think both are OK. Personally, I like whiteboards to outline solutions. A sheet of paper may serve the same purpose.

Once I decided how to solve the problem, vim comes in handy :)

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