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Comment by xamuel | Hacker News Reader

I find these whiteboard problems a breath of fresh air. Coming from an academic background, I've seen the downsides with the alternatives.

* Talking about something you've done? You're selecting for marketing, not programming.

* Letters of recommendation? You're selecting for ability to network, not programming.

* Academic qualifications? You're selecting for persistence, not programming.

* Offline tests? OK right now because they're a minority, but I guarantee if they became the standard, you'd get an astounding amount of cheating.

I'm not a marketer and I really resent how in academia to have any chance you have to "sell sell sell". I appreciate anyone who gives me a chance to just objectively demonstrate my abilities, whether I do well or whether I do poorly.

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>I'm not a marketer and I really resent how in academia to have any chance you have to "sell sell sell".

You have to do this everywhere. There are limited resources. You are competing for them with others. You need to convince a gatekeeper that you deserve those resources. In academia, you are competing for grant money, lab space, etc. on the basis that your work is of more import than that of someone else. In enterprise software sales, you are attempting to convince a customer that your product is a better solution to their business problem than of some competitor's. In an interview, you need to demonstrate that you can accomplish a function better than one of your peers who is also vying for the job, and probably has an almost identical skills profile to you.

Is there supposed to be a link to the whiteboard problems? What are "the alternatives?" Your post seems a bit vague and pretentious.

"Talking about something you've done?"

EXPLAINING something you've done.

It's still marketing. "Something you've done" could be the 'is-negative' repo that was briefly on the frontpage today [1], and the candidate could launch into a heart-rending speech on the virtues of modular programming. It doesn't say anything about whether they can actually program. Or "something you've done" could be an incredibly sophisticated engine and the candidate isn't good at marketing and comes off worse than the first guy, despite being a top-rate programmer.

[1] https://github.com/kevva/is-negative

You're looking for an edge case to break a hard rule.

In an actual interview, when they are talking about something they've done and explaining it, the interviewer will be able to ask more questions and hopefully (as an interviewer) have enough of a technical background to separate the BS from the skills.

If two chemists are talking to each other about chemistry, one's not going to be able to easily just make stuff up that the other blindly accepts.

Well, I guess you might be right with the chemist example, if it's an aquihire type of situation. With something like Google though, I have a feeling these kind of talks wouldn't scale well (in general any time you say the word "hopefully", that's a sign you might be relying too much on luck). Maybe whiteboards for entry level positions, and a combination of whiteboards and fireside chats for senior positions?

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