Ask HN: Companies that don't use whiteboard coding interviews?
5 comments
There are very few companies that do not follow the standard interviewing practices. So if you try to filter them, you won't have enough to get a job.
Instead, you can try approaching things differently. People want to judge your abilities when they feel that it's critical to get the best employee. So you basically need to eliminate their fears. Networking and making friends works pretty good. If you are recommended by an existing employee, the interviewer will take it easy on you. Internships also work pretty good. There is less pressure. And when you prove yourself after a couple of weeks you can demand a salary or walk.
Homework is never a good idea. Searching for a job usually takes you through many companies. If at least half of them give you homework, you will waste days or even weeks just solving imaginary problems that nobody cares about. Solving tasks at home sounds like a good idea at first. But after you do it and the company chooses someone else, all you get is a bitter aftertaste.
As a personal note, it really helps if you treat the interviewers like stupid children. Some readers may be offended by this, but it really works. When you finally accept that he has no idea what he's doing, it will be much easier to control the interview.
Interviewers are rarely good programmers. If they start with something like FizzBuzz, you can easily tell that they don't have the ability to understand things. They just take ideas from somewhere and run with them. No originality, no abstract thought and no critical thinking. Once you see that and realize that you are better, performance anxiety will no longer be a problem.
You're basically being judged by people following a generic checklist they got from a blog or "top 10 interviewing tips" article. Understand their reasoning and you will own them.
Instead, you can try approaching things differently. People want to judge your abilities when they feel that it's critical to get the best employee. So you basically need to eliminate their fears. Networking and making friends works pretty good. If you are recommended by an existing employee, the interviewer will take it easy on you. Internships also work pretty good. There is less pressure. And when you prove yourself after a couple of weeks you can demand a salary or walk.
Homework is never a good idea. Searching for a job usually takes you through many companies. If at least half of them give you homework, you will waste days or even weeks just solving imaginary problems that nobody cares about. Solving tasks at home sounds like a good idea at first. But after you do it and the company chooses someone else, all you get is a bitter aftertaste.
As a personal note, it really helps if you treat the interviewers like stupid children. Some readers may be offended by this, but it really works. When you finally accept that he has no idea what he's doing, it will be much easier to control the interview.
Interviewers are rarely good programmers. If they start with something like FizzBuzz, you can easily tell that they don't have the ability to understand things. They just take ideas from somewhere and run with them. No originality, no abstract thought and no critical thinking. Once you see that and realize that you are better, performance anxiety will no longer be a problem.
You're basically being judged by people following a generic checklist they got from a blog or "top 10 interviewing tips" article. Understand their reasoning and you will own them.
Your best bet are probably very small companies that do not have very many engineers on staff. There are many businesses desperately looking for the value that engineers bring, that don't have the people on hand to grill you for 6 hours in a conference room.
Looking for remote gigs can also help you avoid whiteboards, but that might be harder to do as a jr. engineer (but certainly not impossible).
At the end of the day though, interviewing, including whiteboard coding, is all about "being judged". As someone mentioned, it's a skill worth practicing, either at home with the help of friends, or by applying to a ton of jobs just to practice the interview process. I still find it brings me anxiety after 10 years of working/interviewing, but so much less so than when I started in the industry. I dislike and am annoyed by interviews and whiteboard coding, but I don't fear them any longer.
Looking for remote gigs can also help you avoid whiteboards, but that might be harder to do as a jr. engineer (but certainly not impossible).
At the end of the day though, interviewing, including whiteboard coding, is all about "being judged". As someone mentioned, it's a skill worth practicing, either at home with the help of friends, or by applying to a ton of jobs just to practice the interview process. I still find it brings me anxiety after 10 years of working/interviewing, but so much less so than when I started in the industry. I dislike and am annoyed by interviews and whiteboard coding, but I don't fear them any longer.
For most medium sized companies, hiring is an important but very time consuming process. So, almost every part of the process is designed to scale as the company grows. While there are companies which have a take-home problem, most will require you to write code on a whiteboarding discussion in a face-to-face round later anyway.
My suggestion here will be to take a few interviews without much expectations and to use them as opportunities to get better at this. There are going to be many times when you will be sharing your code with your colleagues - e.g. during code reviews, pair programming etc. and whether you like it or not, people are always evaluating you even in those cases :)
My suggestion here will be to take a few interviews without much expectations and to use them as opportunities to get better at this. There are going to be many times when you will be sharing your code with your colleagues - e.g. during code reviews, pair programming etc. and whether you like it or not, people are always evaluating you even in those cases :)
We[1] have previously given a candidate a (small) work sample test to solve, and allowed them to use either their own system or one of ours to solve it. We don't watch them while they attempt the solution and we allow them full access to the internet. It seems to be revealing enough as to their competence.
1. http://ldrinteractive.com/
1. http://ldrinteractive.com/
As a lighthearted suggestion: have you tried purchasing a whiteboard and practicing writing code on it?
:)
The whiteboard itself isn't really the problem[1]. It's the "writing code in front of people who are judging my performance" part.
[1] Although I do prefer chalk boards. :-) What can I say? I was a math major. ;)
The whiteboard itself isn't really the problem[1]. It's the "writing code in front of people who are judging my performance" part.
[1] Although I do prefer chalk boards. :-) What can I say? I was a math major. ;)
Background: I'm a junior level engineer. I can talk about technical topics (I was a math TA in grad school, and I have no problem talking about code I've written), but coding in front of anyone induces extreme performance anxiety. I'm therefore interested more in companies that do a homework type problem and then have candidates talk about their solution in the interview.
From the previous post, I know Matasano and npm do this. Who else?