Stop Whiteboarding

From TFA (although I realize he's not advocating for this):

“Two of my colleagues will be joining us in a few minutes but I think we can get started. I’d like you to whiteboard an answer to the following prompt: given a string, write a program in any language you want that reverses the string.”

I have not, and will never, do such a thing on an interview. It'd be the shortest interview in history if I were ever asked to.

We have hired plenty of great people just by talking through the relevant technology and asking open ended questions. My thing was usually to talk through HTTP in detail, and I would loosely time how long it would take to get through chunked encoding. Then I'd ask "how would you solve this problem" question, to see how they attack a problem and how they stand up to me poking (sometimes unreasonable) holes in their plan. You don't need panels, committees, quizzes or any of that bs--just ask questions you know the answer to until you're comfortable that they're competent and pleasant to be around.

(I may or may not have gotten Entity Framework tech support for free from an interviewee once in the past, but we don't speak of such things.)

I found this a useful quick read: we all know interviewing is often "broken" (for some value of broken); this is some good, constructive ideas and examples of how to do better.

In particular, asking questions without a predefined narrative seems to be a winning strategy in these stories. There simply is no way to ask how to e.g. reverse a string and turn that into a critical thinking problem. By giving up control of the destination instead and asking questions that explore a new, un-predetermined topic, the interviewer can create a much richer and meaningful exploration for both sides.

Giving up control as a means to empower appears to be the order of the day again. It's quite the metameme.

No, I don't like it. The thing about welders is, thats all they do. They weld one piece of metal to another piece of metal in a way that is PREDETERMINED by a 'higher up' (usually the structural engineer on the project.) When I am looking for an engineer I want someone who is well rounded because I want them to be able to solve unknown problems. So having a Java person know the structure of an Angular project is good, especially if they are going to be working on a project that uses Angular as the front-end. Also I like to put people under the stress of explaining themselves because if they can't take that stress what kind of stress can they take? That is not to say that I don't like to do both styles of interviewing when I look for someone.

TL;DR Whiteboards are bad. Just kidding, keep the whiteboards and don't ask stupid questions.

whiteboarding helps me think. Such a click-baity title ;)