What does HackerNews think of hiring-without-whiteboards?

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.

https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

There is https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards , but there aren't many larger companies on the list

[1] https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

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.

https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

These are good places to start:

https://www.keyvalues.com/

https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

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.

[0] - https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

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/

    $cs->filter(fun($r) { $r->remote and not $r->locations->any(fun($l) { $l=~ /\bUK\b/ and $l=~ /london/i }) })->show_items

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.

https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

Companies interested getting placed on it should raise PRs on https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

Here's a list of some - never used it but was on here a while back:

https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

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