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Comment by time_is_scary | Hacker News Reader

1. Everyone will say they want to "see how you think"

2. You will not get an offer if you do not get a solution

3. Everyone ever: "White board interviews can be awful, but my company actually does a pretty good a job and I find them useful."

edit: for a slightly less snarky comment (and to expand on point 2) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9522400

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I've gotten offers before where my answers to at least one of the whiteboard problems looked roughly like "I don't really know how to do this, but I'll see what progress I can make towards a solution" and either didn't result in a full solution or required pretty extensive help from the interviewer to do so. I've also seen offers made to people who didn't really get a good solution to one of the whiteboard problems posed when I was on the interviewing side but still did well in the rest of the interview and displayed good thinking and problem solving skills even in the question(s) they missed.

#2 is demonstrably wrong.

Of course there will be exceptions, but, given two candidates, the one who did better will get the offer. At big tech companies there is no shortage of people who ace a white-board problem.

Also, if you interview with multiple people for a position (and do multiple white-board problems) you can get an offer without acing all of them.

Well yeah, but that's not what it said. I've had the occasional complete whiteboard disaster (not really my thing) that ended up with offers, including pools where people did bang-up whiteboard work.

There's a lot more at play in any reasonable place than whiteboard performance.

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