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by caliagent 3302 days ago
Because nobody gets assigned a task and rushes to a white board with a non-collaborative audience. The WB wire framing etc is always a discussion amongst peers. Sit your prospects at computers spec'd like they would be using in their role with appropriate Internet access. Knowing what to Google is generally the most used function. What is googled varies with each individual.

The pressure of dumping pseudo code is a poor metric.
1 comments
abeyer 3302 days ago
A good WBI should feel like a discussion with a peer. While I think the interviewer has to be careful not to direct/guide things too much, they should be giving input/feedback/questions along the way, much like a coworker on a real design problem might. Dumping pseudocode shouldn't ever be the metric to evaluate a WBI, but just a product of the conversation with the interviewer, which is a far more interesting indicator.
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caliagent 3302 days ago
I agree but have yet to find one that went that way. More companies in the wild, as I alluded to, who feel that's what they should be doing with little to no understanding of how. Same for all of those brainteaser fizzbuzz-esque problems.
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abeyer 3302 days ago
Good ones aren't as common as they should be...bad interviews in general are disturbingly common, though, I don't think tech interviews in general or whiteboard specifically are any different.

Brainteasers and fizzbuzz are very different things though: I'm not totally against brain teasers as a prompt for discussion, but they're not my favorite types of questions, and can be hard to judge or of little use if the person either already knows the trick, or just doesn't figure it out. Fizzbuzz on the other hand makes a lot of sense when you're interviewing someone who you don't have any other knowledge of their coding. That type of question absolutely makes a good first pass filter: the problem is easy to explain, the implementation is trivial to do in a few minutes if you are at all qualified. Sure, it's annoying for an experienced person to have to do a fizzbuzz variant for the 200th time, but given that it takes almost no time, and helps the interviewer quickly jump to more advanced stuff or cut off an interview that isn't going to go anywhere, it's a pretty minor inconvenience.

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