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Comment by Evansbee | Hacker News Reader

I feel bad for this lady, but there's a flaw in this logic (and with the logic of many commenters here).

Everyone assumes that the battle is between...

Person 1: -Great resume -Relevant work history -Strong sense of corporate citizenship -Can't code on white board

and Person 2: -Can code on whiteboard -Smokes crack in the bathroom

But the reality is, you're all interviewing for the same job! You're not getting the job, not because you can't whiteboard code, but because someone else has the same qualifications AND CAN whiteboard code.

Which would you choose?

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Unless I was hiring a professional whiteboard coder, I would find another method.

I believe that /this/ is short sighted.

I do interviews, I care less about the right answer than I do about the problem solving approach. I interview electrical engineers and I make them do simple transistor problems. If someone gave up and said that they couldn't do it without some sort of SPICE program, I'd cut the interview pretty short. But if the fundamentals are there, even if they don't remember something stupid, knowing how they approach a problem and if they know how to ask for help is more important.

Every time someone says "I didn't get the job b/c I couldn't do a linked list on the whiteboard." I'm fairly certain it was more than that.

My point is that a person's inability to code on a whiteboard has little to do with the value they can provide to the business. Some people just aren't good at it, and why should they be penalized for it? There are other ways to get programmers to write code in an interview, and a simple "Do you prefer to code on the whiteboard or on a computer?" can resolve this. It's not as though that's a huge burden on the business or the interviewer.

I've been doing a lot of interviewing recently. When people struggle with a white board problem, I give them a laptop to code on. I have yet to find someone who struggled at the white board, but did fine on the laptop. Maybe they exist, but I tend to think there's a high correlation between white board performance and laptop performance.

Sorry, what? You seriously think some people's coding skill depends on the writing medium? That's not what the OP was saying: they said they didn't know how to create a linked list from scratch, whether they were writing on a whiteboard, a computer or with a crayon on the back of a 4000 year old cuneiform tablet from Mesopotamia.

Is it that you just don't like the kind of problems that are being asked (fundamental computer science) and would rather see more real-world problems? Or do you genuinely think the wide, stubby pen and vertical orientation impairs some people's coding ability? Just to note, I can see the performance aspect of the whiteboard is stressful, but coding on a machine with everyone looking at you is stressful too.

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