Over 15 years professional experience here, master's degree in CS, and I often struggle with whiteboarding. Looking for a new job now and some of the questions I've been asked:
I could go on and on. So stupid. How does answering any of these on the fly signal ability as a programmer?
The take-home tests are the least offensive to me, because at least they simulate what it's like to work on a real project (somewhat).
The HackerRank.com tests aren't any better than live whiteboarding -- why can't I look stuff up (they disable copying and pasting)? Are you not allowed to look stuff up at a real job?
All these stupid questions implicitly assume the same thing: the most important developer skill is memorizing a large corpus of algorithms to obscure problems.
Trust me, it's not.
It'll probably take one of the FANG companies to start de-emphasizing this nonsense before everyone else stops mimicking them.
Over 15 years professional experience here, master's degree in CS, and I often struggle with whiteboarding. Looking for a new job now and some of the questions I've been asked:
1. Overlapping maximal interval sets (https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/find-the-point-where-maximum-i...)
2. Print a matrix in a spiral form (https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/print-a-given-matrix-in-spiral...)
3. Implement setInterval using setTimeout (recursion)
4. Shorten a string of repeated letters (dddbbbaa) into numerical format (3d3b2a). also write function to reverse this process
5. Given this JSON input, write an API in NodeJS
6. Write an algorithm to convert decimals to Roman numerals (https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/converting-decimal-number-lyin...)
7. Convert from prefix to postfix notation (https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/prefix-postfix-conversion/)
I could go on and on. So stupid. How does answering any of these on the fly signal ability as a programmer?
The take-home tests are the least offensive to me, because at least they simulate what it's like to work on a real project (somewhat).
The HackerRank.com tests aren't any better than live whiteboarding -- why can't I look stuff up (they disable copying and pasting)? Are you not allowed to look stuff up at a real job?
All these stupid questions implicitly assume the same thing: the most important developer skill is memorizing a large corpus of algorithms to obscure problems.
Trust me, it's not.
It'll probably take one of the FANG companies to start de-emphasizing this nonsense before everyone else stops mimicking them.