What does HackerNews think of hiring-without-whiteboards?
⭐️ Companies that don't have a broken hiring process
They will pay less. You may have to relocate. But that's life.
If you can't leverage your network to forego these types of technical interviews, you're pretty much stuck with two options:
A) Learn and master the process.
B) Start looking for work elsewhere.
If you want to earn big bucks working for the selective few, then you need to choose A. If you can't hack that, go with B. Here's a list, which may or may not be up to date: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
The absolute first priority should be to be employed, and earn money to support yourself/your family. Spending 12 months to "perfect" Leetcode questions is something which mostly only young, single or well-off people can afford.
Once you're employed, and getting a steady paycheck, then start to study harder for those LC-style technical interviews.
I was laid off last year and went to interview at an adjacent employer. They had a bunch of employees (not only engineers) hired from the company that was laying me off. One of which had previously walked out the door with a bunch of code to form their own startup; they were hired as a staff engineer. That employee frequently reached out to me for advice and guidance on writing the piece of code that they made off with.
I flunked their cargo-culting hiring process hard. I knew I should have walked out of the interview the minute they put fucking Leetcode in front of me, but didn't.
Moral of the story: your interview success has little to do with your experience and aptitude as an engineer. Here's a list of shops where you might find more success: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
I'm not saying you have to use this list tho, just making a point.
The industry is at a point where there are plenty of clueless cookie cutter companies cargo culting Leetcode just because those interesting companies engage in it.
As far as interesting companies that don't require that, there's at least Stripe, famously, and surely more from this list:
There is https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards , but there aren't many larger companies on the list
Please just don't. You're better than that. Here's a list of companies who don't participate in this bullshit: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
At my current gig I was hired at staff level in Nov. 190k (please, let's normalize sharing salaries) . I could do better, but I am passionate about my job for the first time in 10 years. How much do you value happiness?
You're not an imposter. Especially as an HN reader (you're actually interested in your job).
https://airtable.com/shr5TdnpVYVTpeRrN/tbluCbToxQ2knSLhh
Similar to the first link, as a github repo: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
Information related to companies, their culture/values, and hiring process: https://www.keyvalues.com/
You should check out https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards, which is a list of companies that don’t use LeetCode in their interview process.
An issue I often ran into when using the repo myself was I’d find a company that sounded awesome, and then find that they didn’t have any open positions. I created nowhiteboard.org to act as a way to pull all the jobs from the companies listed on that repo (and other companies that I’ve manually found that don’t use LeetCode).
I think there’s a matter of education and shining a light on the companies that don’t use LeetCode as I feel that the prevailing notion in online communities is that companies only use LeetCode to interview. I’m obviously biased since I’m obsessively researching this, but I’ve read a good few comments online of engineers who’ve stated that they haven’t had to use LeetCode for any of their interviews over their career, and that all of those companies aren’t listed on the repo above.
If companies had a good way to source candidates that are hesitant to jump jobs specifically because of LeetCode, I could see our industry starting to make some semblance of progress towards making LeetCode less prevalent in interviews.
Anyways, rant over, hope your job searching goes well!
Another factor to consider is how much $$$ you're looking for - if it's FAANG level salaries and you hate LeetCode interviews, you're in for a pretty bad time. If you're looking for a high percentile salary relative to other people in the US, there's some pretty good flexibility.
One final factor to consider is how much experience you currently have. I think less experience will correlate more with higher frequency of LeetCode interviews.
Self promo disclaimer: I started a job board that's pulling from the https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards repo and lets you filter companies by their interview process, while also showing the available jobs. I'm in the same boat as you where I'm very cynical of the current interviewing atmosphere, so created the website for people that may feel the same way. My website is https://nowhiteboard.org/
This site would basically be the same list - with the added goal of explicitly filtering employees and employers who want to hire this way.
I have also found that startups tend to be more lenient. Perhaps look at angel.co/jobs, workatastartup.com/jobs or TechCrunch to find companies that have raised money recently.
Lastly it looks like you have C# experience. It seems there are some openings in the gaming industry; maybe consider learning Unity or Unreal Engine?
Although not exactly what you are asking, this interview behavior could be a reflection of internal values.
Take this with a grain of salt, because my experience may differ from many here (never worked at FAANG, I spent a lot of time at smaller startups in Boulder and am currently in Miami) but I have only been put in front of a whiteboard one time during many dozens of interviews and it was a generic logic puzzle to see how I performed under pressure.
Having been on both sides of the hiring table now many times, there is only one approach that makes sense to me:
1. Speak to them over the phone to make sure they are decent human being, verify again in person.
2. Be upfront with general compensation ability and expectations so that neither of you waste the others time.
3. Do a pair-programming exercise where they build a small piece of software that mirrors something that would be working on as a day-to-day there. Make it clear that finishing is not important, you just want to see their thought process and how they communicate. Ask them to refactor parts of it at some point to see how coach-able they are and how they respond to criticism.
This strategy has worked exceedingly well for me, and when I was on the other end of the hiring table the companies whose process generally looked like this were great places to work with good people.
Algorithm questions are a hazing ritual, and so many junior devs get sucked into wasting hundreds of hours practicing them when they could be building real-world skills. This practice has got to stop, IMO.
These are good places to start:
I agree to some extent, here are some that don't do these interviews [0]. But unfortunately, I find that all tech companies and strangely non-tech companies are trying to normalize the coding interview tests. Pre-interview challenges are useless, since a candidate can easily cheat them by searching-copypaste-refactor the optimal solution from another computer into their own editor and submit it as their own. Doing this easily fools many assessment tools all the time, despite their 'machine learning detection' claims.
But nowadays, it is the on-site interviews which is the new normal. But depending on the sort of company you are applying to, I would ask questions on where they actually apply them or use them in their so called 'engineering challenges'. FAANG, large banks and several fintech companies is certainly justified. 10-15 employee startups based on a mobile app? Hardly. I would expect that larger companies that have their own technologies, programming languages or libraries will ask these coding challenges and if an interviewer cannot justify the use of these questions other than 'to see how you program' then I just end the interview gracefully.
I would instead ask the candidate to send a link to some relevant open-source projects or significant contributions that meet the technologies I am using. No silly hello-world/git-flow/test projects. I can easily eliminate 90% of candidates by checking that you have a patch and are mentioned in the AUTHORS file of an open-source project, which is more quicker than these programming tests designed to hopelessly find 𝔶𝔢 𝔞𝔫𝔠𝔦𝔢𝔫𝔱 𝔩𝔢𝔤𝔢𝔫𝔡 𝔬𝔣 𝔶𝔢 յօ𝔵 𝔡𝔢𝔳𝔢𝔩𝔬𝔭𝔢𝔯.
Reader beware, of course, I know at least one company on there shouldn't be.
That's actually pretty cool. May I ask how?
> Because "knows DP" is pretty much the only bit of information you get
Yes if the candidate meets with only one interviewer or if every interviewer asks only DP. I hope most companies don't interview that way - that would truly be a broken interview process. Obviously you ask about other stuff in the other interviews.
> The interviewer picked them up somewhere, is now familiar with them,
Lol, isn't that one reason every interview question is asked? I've never asked a question whose answer I wasn't familiar with. I know how you meant that though.
There are plenty of companies that don't do whiteboard problems or ask DP. Here's a few: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
> We could ask people to, IDK, write code that solves actual problems
It's pretty hard to get someone solving actual problems in a single day. Do you have some examples of how this might be done?
https://github.com/pflanze/functional-perl/blob/master/examp...
If you want to run it:
sudo apt-get install libfunction-parameters-perl libterm-readline-gnu-perl libpadwalker-perl
git clone https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
git clone https://github.com/pflanze/functional-perl
functional-perl/examples/hiring-without-whiteboards --help
functional-perl/examples/hiring-without-whiteboards hiring-without-whiteboards/
E.g. to search for companies that offer remote jobs but not also jobs in London, UK: $cs->filter(fun($r) { $r->remote and not $r->locations->any(fun($l) { $l=~ /\bUK\b/ and $l=~ /london/i }) })->show_items
Disclosure: I'm the author of the Functional Perl libraries.https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
Don't give up so soon. You can do this.
Don't listen to people telling you that you shouldn't be a programmer. Doing these sort of puzzles has very little to do with 90% of what programmers do. There are jobs that need these algorithm skills, sure, but they're not the default jobs.
I am wondering whether you have considered companies that don't white board.[1]
This is an interesting list that has been posted here before:
- https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
But if you want to work somewhere firmly in the whiteboard club - do regular practice on hackerrank and leetcode. Many interviewers will draw their questions directly from those sites (and some others, I'm sure).
(Personally, I honestly feel those exercises have improved my coding, so there's that too.)
Companies interested getting placed on it should raise PRs on https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
I'm sorry man no cares that you and everyone who upvoted this comment are Super God programmers with 30 offers everytime they say they are looking who can afford to tell every company where they can stuff their interview.
Us mere mortals are willing to do whatever it takes to get our dream gigs.
These guides are largely targeted are getting into the some of the best, thus pickiest and most selective, companies in the world.
And if getting on means being a dsalgo monkey in front of a whiteboard for a few hours so be it.
Let us share interview tips in peace please.
This "hurr durr technical interviews suck" but I have no real alternative and have never built a company nor seen any really flourish at the top without this is monotonous.
Put your money where your mouth is and start and only support companies that skip these kinds of interviews.
Like these fine people
https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
But the snarky comments are beyond annoying.
Here's a list of some - never used it but was on here a while back:
https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
CircleCI is in there too.
Maybe this used to be true, but I don't think it's true anymore. It's very likely still true in the fresh graduate to early 20's age range of candidates. But at this point, senior engineers know what this process is about. And I think many are deciding to just avoid this process since it's very biased against senior engineers (who are rusty on DS and algorithms and don't have time to study it like a second job). So the flood of senior talent is probably less now than it used to be. But Google doesn't care. The main reason is, success hides all failures. They're still generating billions in revenue every quarter. Until those numbers change, no one is going to care about fixing a broken process like this.
Next time I look for a new job, I'm going to start with this list: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards and give priority to companies that don't have this type of process. I hope more companies recognize that they can get a big competitive advantage for senior engineering talent by not copying the Google process.
https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards has a list of companies who don't participate in this particular flavor of shenanigans.
[0] https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
related HN discussion thread[1]