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Comment by paradygm | Hacker News Reader

> I've told at least 5 or 6 companies that wanted to white-board me to suck it. It's honestly insulting that I'm forced to white-board when I have two books with my name on them (published by Apress), contributions to Golang (small commits, but they still got me in the AUTHORS file), and OSS projects with hundreds of stars on GitHub

That is all commendable but none of that tells me if I can work with you. When I interview candidates I use whiteboarding as a collaborative opportunity to see how the interviewee thinks. I treat it as a similar experience when I am the one being interviewed, which is why I have never understood the hostility toward whiteboarding. How else in the limited window of time that is the interview can I learn as much about the people I would be working with?

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> a collaborative opportunity to see how the interviewee thinks.

In principle, this sounds great. In reality, if the interviewee fails to come up with the correct/optimal solution for the duration of the interview, they are going to be rejected.

lmao yeah, ask my ziprecruiter interviewer how well I "collaborated" despite being rejected for not getting the optimal dp solution in 45 minutes

> I have never understood the hostility toward whiteboarding

Maybe you haven't been blown off and treated like an idiot by some interviewer when you couldn't answer their pet question? Even when you're more experienced and skilled than they were?

> I have never understood the hostility toward whiteboarding

If anything a candidate that rejects whiteboarding is a good signal that they're not a good team fit.

I personally prefer to conduct coding interviews in an environment where the code can be executed (if that's the main objection for "whiteboarding"), but even so the environment is often too different from what the interviewee is used to (IDE / availability of familiar libs / OS environment) that it's not that different from whiteboarding anyways.

In my personal experience there are indeed occasionally people that I'd recommend for strong hire with their past experience / credentials alone, but it's too rare to make any rule out of it, and if any candidate outright rejects it, it probably gives a signal that I'd personally interpret as negative anyways.

This is the dumbest excuse for white boarding/l33t code that isn’t even applied in real life.

You can be the most pleasant person who’s articulating their thoughts in simple and easy to understand ways and if you don’t solve the bullshit problem in o(-1) time you’ll get rejected.

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