Which is equally useless. In the end you’re developing a skill that will only be used in tests. You’re training to be evaluated and not to do a job well.
A whiteboard interview…? They’re still incredibly common, especially for new grads.
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 10 months ago
lunarul@lemmy.world 10 months ago
A company that still does whiteboard interviews one I have no interest in working for. When I interview candidates I want to see how they will perform in their job. Their job will not involve writing code on whiteboards, solving weird logic problems, or knowing how to solve traveling salesman problem off the top of their heads.
pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz 10 months ago
And what happens when you run into the company that wants people who can prove they conceptually understand what the hell it is they’re doing on their own, which requires a whiteboard?
I program as a hobby and I’ll jot down code and plans for programs on paper when I am out and about during the day. The fuck kind of dystopian hellhole mindset do you have where you think all that matters is doing the bare minimum to survive? You know that life means more than that, don’t you?
lunarul@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The ability to conceptually understand what they’re doing is exactly what I’m testing for when interviewing. Writing a full program on a whiteboard is definitely not required for that. I can get that from asking them question, observing how they approach the problem, what kind of questions they ask me etc.
I definitely don’t want them to do just the bare minimum to survive or to need to ask me for advice at every step (had people who ended up taking more of my time than it would’ve taken me to do their job myself).
I’ve never needed to write more than a short snippet of code at a time on a whiteboard, slack channel, code review, etc. in my almost 20 years in the industry. Definitely not to solve a whole problem blindly. In fact I definitely see it as a red flag when a candidate writes a lot of code without ever stopping to execute and test each piece individually. It simply becomes progressively more difficult to debug the more you add to it, that’s common sense.
Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 10 months ago
That’s a valid opinion, and I largely share it. But, all these students need to work somewhere. This is something the industry needs to change before the school changes it.
Also, I’ve definitely done white board coding discussions in practice, e.g., go into a room, write up ideas on the white board (including small snippets of code or pseudo code).
lunarul@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’ve done that too back before the remote work era, but using a whiteboard as a visual aid is not the same thing as solving a whole problem on a whiteboard.
Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 10 months ago
It’s a close enough problem; a lot of professors I’ve known aren’t going to sweat the small stuff even on paper. Like, they’re not plugging your code into a computer and expecting it to build, they’re just looking for the algorithm design, and that there’s no grotesque violation of the language rules.