Refusing whiteboarding interview
During my career as a programmer, I’ve gotten rejected 3 times because of whiteboarding. This practice is often applied during a job interview where you’re put into a situation to solve abstract algorithm problems. Livecoding is a very similar method for me: you do the same thing “live”, on an editor, without being able to check on google, instead of on a whiteboard.
To solve these algorithms, you need a few weeks of training. Websites like hackerrank help you. If a candidate did something quite cool before, or is quite original in his ideas, if he fails the whiteboarding he will simply not get the job. Maybe a company like Google needs to find a way to filter their candidates by doing whiteboarding because it’s a fast process. I would like to challenge this idea because it actually takes some time to organize the whiteboarding interview process, and it could be quite fast to simply see their old coding repo, check a work to do from home, or simply a situation of pair programming where you are put into the actual work environment solving real stuff; stuffs that are actually useful for the company.
The world of tech should not be limited to people solving fast abstract mathematical problems. This practice should change if we want real diversity in a tech team with people thinking differently. I’m not saying that we need to hire people with no technical skills. I’m saying that the technical skills of a programmer is not limited to an engineer being able to do good math or statistics.
I also think that whiteboarding interviews could be seen as a right of passage into the tech world and it’s cultural: even if it’s useless for the job in solving abstract math and statistics you still need to do this week of training. The one disciplined enough to follow this ritual will get the job.