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Comment by RogerL | Hacker News Reader

If you want to measure giving a public presentation....have them give a public presentation.

If you want to measure their ability to pair program ... pair program with them.

If you want to measure their ability to mentor ... have them teach you something they know.

I want to know how you do X, and measuring X is easy, so please do Y as a proxy is never a good approach.

I have never, in my 25+ year career, ever had to whiteboard a problem, where the other person knows the answer (that is laughable - I've given correct answers and been told they are wrong), I don't, and there are hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake. It just has nothing to do with the job or on the job performance.

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If you're whiteboarding with a simple pass/fail mentality, I'd say you're doing it wrong. A good whiteboarding exercise lets you see how a candidate explores a problem. Do they ask insightful questions? How do they break a problem down? Do they bluff when faced with something they don't know?

These are behavioral attributes that are important - much more important than a simple binary test.

Finding out how someone reacts to being told they are wrong when they know that they are right is a totally valid interview technique.

Furthermore, I think past basic fizzbuzz questions, complex interview questions are good, but someone failing to get an objectively correct solution to an objectively difficult problem is just one signal among many. The goal of asking the questions should be to gather lots of other signals about how you approach writing software, not to pronounce you right or wrong.

If someone was playing emotional tricks on me during an interview, such as telling me I'm wrong when I'm right, I'd lose interest in the opportunity.

One interviewer tried yelling at me for no reason, just to see if I would react or flinch.

I had an interviewer tell me that I was wrong that DNS ran over UDP. Not sure if the interviewer was trying to run some psychological test or if he was just wrong.

Seriously? People do that? I hope you walked out.

I was polite and stayed until the end. It was through a headhunter, so I decided to be polite. I knew that was a no-go interview after 1 minute, when I saw that everyone working there was Indian.

Excellent answer Roger. Whiteboard is not a silver bullet. It really depends on what the interview really trying to asses and use a better tool to do that, I would personally prefer to write code in a developer environment (IDE etc) as that is the most natural place for me to write quality code.

White-boarding is good for high level design and architecture but not for actual code.

You're right, I've never whiteboarded a problem where the other person knows the answer. A thousand times have I sat down in front of a whiteboard with coworkers looking to solve a problem. That's how I interview too.

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