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Comment by water9 | Hacker News Reader

Whiteboard tests are not a good way to evaluate people. It doesn’t tell you if they’re going to be a leader. It doesn’t tell you if they’re going to take an initiative. It doesn’t tell you if they’re going to be a person that complains all the time. It doesn’t tell you if they’re going to be able to solve problems they haven’t seen before which by nature will be all problems they encounter.

Whiteboarding interviews are a good way to make the applicant feel bad about themselves so you can lowball them in salary, however

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I agree, but the same can be said of any other interview technique. There's no rock solid, reliable way to determine in 30-60 minutes whether a candidate is going to be a good hire. I'm not in favor of whiteboards, but I'm also not necessarily in favor of anything else.

I'm told that in the early days of the German branch of takeaway.com they would conduct interviews late and invite the interviewee to their after work beer and only hire the person if they thought they would enjoy future beers with them. Obviously only useful to somewhat determine personality but in my experience that is often a better predictor for a good hire than tech skills.

I think the biggest issue with this is that you leave yourself open to bias. The person you're most likely to enjoy food/drinks with is the person you're most likely to be friends with. You'll end up with teams hiring via popularity, and possibly excluding those from other cultures or who have different personality traits.

That is an unprofessional, abusive way to treat job applicants. It's going to filter out those who don't drink or who have evening family obligations. Any hiring manager who engages in these shenanigans should be ashamed of themselves. And in the USA at least, they could potentially be exposing the company to legal jeopardy.

> often a better predictor for a good hire than tech skills

On the other hand, the inability to write a nested for loop is a reliable predictor for a bad hire.

Some people have good resumes and can present themselves well. But they can't write very basic code, no matter how much handholding they get.

How do you make sure you don't hire these people?

You don't need leetcode challenges to weed out people who are lying or totally incompetent. I simple whiteboard test such as reversing a list will do the trick!

>>> Whiteboard tests are not a good way to evaluate people

>> How do you make sure you don't hire these people?

> I simple whiteboard test such as reversing a list will do the trick!

Agreed. I did a lot of hiring interviews of experienced embedded C programmers. A few of the applicants could not read two bytes from memory and combine them into a 16-bit integer, no matter how much handholding they got.

But they had good resumes and interviewed well other than that.

So some kind of check of their actual technical skills is valuable.

We spent a much larger portion of the interview having them explain things like "how would you implement a firmware upgrade architecture where the power can be lost at any time during the upgrade?"

list.reverse() Hey ChatGPT how to reverse a list?

Why are you hiring the guy if the job is that easy? Just because someone can do leetcode questions doesn’t mean that they can design a system or even design an API. That actually requires creativity not memorization.

I wouldn't recommend hiring someone (except perhaps for an entry level job) based on ANY kind of whiteboard test. For a senior person it's their experience that counts, which is why the interview should be around what's on their resume.

The list reverse (or anything similar - count word occurrences in a list) doesn't qualify someone for the job, but is a good way to quickly tell if someone is lying about their experience, which unfortunately some do, especially for low paying contractor jobs. For stuff this simple I'd expect people to just write it down in 30 sec once they've asked any clarifying questions (such as can I use list.reverse() - no).

I completely agree with you, but it seems like even for senior or staff software positions they still whiteboard interview you.

Here’s the problem though: most software development is done alone and most software engineers are introverts. They do not like to be put on the spot and be the center of attention. When you ask them to do things under pressure (which basically means your company is always having fires to put out - management problem) they can’t think straight because half their mind is focused on how you’re judging them because the interview matters to them much more than it matters to you. You’re not giving them a fair test.

I don't think it's fair to give any kind of challenging test in an interview, but something really simple like this is different - they are not really being asked to solve anything, just to show that they can indeed use the language they've got listed on their resume.

Are you hiring a captain for an extraterrestrial mission or an average programmer who will sit 8 hours a day in a cubicle, working on jira tickets?

And if you're hiring for the latter, don't give the candidate the impression you're looking for the former. It's very insulting to think you're being hired to take initiative and provide leadership for the team to solve problems and then be told you aren't clicking on the right Jira buttons to make the metrics look good.

At some point the candidate is going to need to write some code. If you haven't been involved in hiring, you might not know how little proficiency it's possible to have in actually writing code, while having a beautiful looking resume.

Clicking buttons in jira alone isn't going to go very far.

I've been on both sides of interviewing, so much so that I can almost tell just be looking at subtle things on a resume or in interviewing whether or the person has real programming skill. In my early days, I hired some real stinkers, and learned from those errors. I've worked with people who wrote code that made The Daily WTF[1] (I know, because I submitted it) I know how to reject candidates that check the boxes that HR screens but can't code. I've consulted (mercifully briefly) at organizations where programmers whose primary skillset was using copy/paste but were able to jump through all the Jira (technically Azure DevOps: same shit, different name) hoops were given ownership of key parts of a system.

What were you saying about proficiency?

1. https://thedailywtf.com/ I'd link the actual post but it was over a decade ago and

That's great if it works for you. I haven't figured out all these subtle cues so I still have to give coding exercises.

You might find it interesting to track what happens to the people who do your coding exercises. For the ones you hire, how do they do in the company? If you can see happens to those you reject, via whatever online profile they have, you'll get a good sense of when you missed a good hire.

I like the idea. I might try to do it. Not so much that I sign up for linkedin or anything, but this could be useful.

My strategy was always the same, ask technical questions and go deeper with each question until the applicants says something like "I don't know but I would do xyz to find out."

But I always warn first that there's no problem if they don't know the answer so they know first-hand they can say I don't know.

Very easy to detect bullshitter that will invent stuff or those on the first level of dunningkruger.

And the best moment of my life was when I interviewed someone who had all the answers and the explanation of why it was working this way. I told hr that we had to hire him in a higher position than me!

I like the strategy, and I do something similar. You really just need to ask them about their experience and listen to them talk. The people that know what they’re doing will gladly go into too much detail whereas the impostors will say a lot of jargon, but not explain how things work

It tells you if they lied hard on their resume, which is often sufficient.

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