Comment by poorjohnmacafee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by poorjohnmacafee | Hacker News Reader

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poorjohnmacafee

Well the whiteboard is in my opinion not about technical correctness, and I don't appreciate companies that obsess on the technical aspect of it. It's about testing if it's the type of person you can sit down and work through a problem with. Some companies want all the programmers to meet up each day at stand ups, or sit them close to each other, and they can share problems and seek out help from each other. I get that. Working through a problem together on a whiteboard is a preview of that type of interaction.

Still that kind of coding environment can get annoying, so maybe you're trying to avoid those aspects too :) Personally now have enough money where I have zero interest to participate in those kind of employee environments, it's not something I'd choose to do and am happy to have exited it. Only want to work on own projects and ventures on own terms.

Anytime someone has given me a whiteboard and I ask questions, I usually get frustrating answers, like "I guess you could try that" and not actual concrete answers. I live near Waterloo, ON, which has a tech hub and big university that leans towards tech, so maybe it's a univeristy culture thing.

Anyway, that's why my policy is to just say no to whiteboarding during interviews. I'd rather sit at a computer with another human who wants to see me succeed over stand at a whiteboard with people that want to dissect how I think.

Who works with someone _through code_ using a whiteboard?!

Drawing an architecture diagram or so, sure, but code? I would definitely prefer to work with people who know how to do screensharing and work over a problem in the code using an actual editor.

Seriously, I've worked at companies where everyone loved whiteboards, and I've been doing this work for almost two decades, but doubt I've seen more than 100 total lines of even pseudocode written on whiteboards, outside lectures or interviews. I doubt I've written more than a dozen such lines myself (again, barring interviews). Maybe some places work very differently from what I'm used to? TV shows and movies, even ones that are relatively down-to-Earth (Silicon Valley) love having programmers write code on whiteboards, so maybe that is how lots of us operate, I've just managed to never be around that kind of culture, somehow.

[EDIT] of course there are other, practical reasons a show or movie might have their characters do that, but I'm just offering the possibility that that more closely reflects common programmer experience than what I've seen first-hand does.

How old are you?

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