What does HackerNews think of hiring-without-whiteboards?

⭐️ Companies that don't have a broken hiring process

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Maybe you'll find this useful, I think I saw it elsewhere in this thread and bookmarked it https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
There is a simple solution to this, but it is one that many in similar situations will refuse to even look at: Lower your standards, and start looking at "lesser" companies that don't follow the same leetcode-style interviews.

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.

> Did not get an offer because I was not strong enough candidate

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

I spent half a year doing l33tcode tests, then I realized there are more than a few companies that don't use this method for interviewing.

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

I'm not saying you have to use this list tho, just making a point.

> Companies that have high standards are far more interesting places to work at and with more interesting colleagues. They all require whiteboards and leet code.

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:

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

How do you find the better-quality companies you apply to? Are you able to decline to answer algorithm questions when they're asked, and instead convince companies to accept code samples?

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

You don't need to completely avoid SV-style companies as some people recommend. Check out: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards.
> leetcode

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).

Have you seen this list of companies that hire without whiteboard/coding interviews? You might also want to refresh your skillset into something like React and NodeJS which has a lot of jobs these days. After having done so, it is relatively easy to get jobs making into the six figures. Hope this helps.

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

I know it doesn't directly answer your question, but there is a nice repository of companies[1] that lists their technical interview processes (take-home project, live coding exercise, etc).

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

A spreadsheet of companies that eschew algorithm/leetcode style questions, and information on what they do use instead:

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/

I think at 7 YOE, you’re at a very good spot where you have the flexibility of being picky with what types of interviews you can choose to interact with. Especially in this current market where it’s one of the rare times that candidates have some semblance of power in the hiring process.

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!

I think it largely depends on what you consider a nightmare. Luckily, it's a very nice time to be looking for a job, so you have a lot of flexibility for what form of nightmare you're willing to submit yourself to.

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/

Not sure how well updated it is anymore, but I remember this juicy list floating around HN a couple years ago.

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

A list is good idea. Here's one of the main lists. https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

This site would basically be the same list - with the added goal of explicitly filtering employees and employers who want to hire this way.

There is this list of companies that don't use Leetcode questions as a filter: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

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?

Yesterday I found this list: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

Although not exactly what you are asking, this interview behavior could be a reflection of internal values.

Totally agree. There are a lot of companies that are trying to improve this: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards.
Is it really that rare that companies have legitimate hiring processes and realistic interviews?

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

Keep at it and try to distinguish what kind of culture the company has in the first call with the recruiter. Don’t even bother with a tech screen until you know that.

These are good places to start:

https://www.keyvalues.com/

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

> Coding challenges are a useless metric IMO. They also waste time.

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

Not exactly that, but you might like to peruse https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

Reader beware, of course, I know at least one company on there shouldn't be.

Can you please contribute the names of these companies to https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards You'd make me and a lot other people a big big favor. Thanks a mil.
> I've seen a few interviews in my time. On the order of 5k of them)

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?

I've written a script to allow me to filter the list, using the Functional Perl libraries. Maybe someone will translate it to JS?

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.
Here is a repository of companies that don't force you into solving fizz buzz problems: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
Lots of companies don't do puzzles, or you can bypass the puzzle, or you can sell your ability to work independently, etc.. See https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards and https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/07/29/getting-a-job-withou...
For anyone that wants to work for a company that DOES NOT do white-boarding during interviews, here's a solid list: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
Not all places hire using these types of interview techniques:

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

Don't give up so soon. You can do this.

Lots of companies don't do stupid programming puzzles. Here's a list: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

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.

Apply to companies that don't do whiteboarding/phoneboarding. I don't know, maybe this is a US thing, or the Big Four thing, but down here in London I am yet to encounter a company that does whiteboarding.

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

I can empathize with your problem. Was just talking to a friend an hour ago about this.

I am wondering whether you have considered companies that don't white board.[1]

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

There are definitely companies out there that don't follow the Cracking the Code Interview/Hacker Rank formula.

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.)

Some permutation of this comment is made litterally everytime any coding interview resource is posted.

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.

Wrong question - the right question is "which companies don't have the typical whiteboard interview". Mine didn't, and it's a regular software engineer job.

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

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

Here's a list of companies that don't do this https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards I hope it's the beginning of an industry wide trend away from these types of interviews.
If whiteboarding is not for you, this list was on HN few weeks back.

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

CircleCI is in there too.

Check out some of the companies here. They hire based on trial projects (mostly unpaid).

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

I think the tide is turning against this type of interview. The industry is starting to notice how ineffective and stupid it is. The big tech companies don't care and will continue doing it because success hides all failures. When there's an endless flood of new college graduate applicants and near-monopoly positions bringing in billions of revenue, nobody cares if the hiring process is bad. They will care someday if those conditions change, but that's in the distant future. Most companies, especially small companies, are not in this position and should have a different process. It's becoming a competitive advantage, especially if a company is looking for senior engineers, to not have this interview process. For example, this list of companies was in a HN story a while ago: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards The trend is growing and it's a good change for the industry.
It seems many acknowledge that the Google process (and other similar ones) is very flawed with a high false negative rate, but it's considered ok because there's a flood of talent always applying to Google.

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.

I'd rather work with the ones who actually care about the people they're solving problems for vs the ones who can write bubble sort with no reference material, which happens in the real world precisely never. Employers pay developers to solve problems, not necessarily to write the most efficient code possible. I get that it's a craft and it's good to understand what happens under the hood, but you can get pretty damn far solving actual business problems for people without having to care which brand of sort ES2016 uses. These skills in micro-optimizations / textbook CS don't help much with understanding customers and solving their problems at the end of the day, so they're really not that valuable for many business scenarios. I think that a lot of engineers in this industry forget that they're not generally paid to write the most efficient data structures and algorithms for 40 hours a week, and that ironically, attempting to do so would very likely not be the most efficient means of increasing shareholder value. Can't see the forest for the B-trees, if you will.

https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards has a list of companies who don't participate in this particular flavor of shenanigans.

not saying these companies[0] wont ask these types of questions, but at least they wont ask you to answer them on a whiteboard

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

related HN discussion thread[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13874026

Sounds like you need to pick companies better or brush up on these questions.

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