[subhobroto]

Hey ZhL,

that's not just you.

It's me and everyone else I know.

That's why these are called whiteboard firing squads.

The only way I know to improve on whiteboard interview performance is to do more whiteboard interviews unfortunately.

I know it does not make sense. I know it does not teach your or help you further any actual skill you will actually use day to day, but that's the problem we programmers have painted ourselves into.

The "remote" equivalent to whiteboard interviews are "live coding" sessions where you type code into a site like codebunk.io

Some random person who works at your potential employer will send you a link to a site you can type code into and ask you to solve a "5 minute problem". It's not fizzbuzz, it's not a for loop - it's going to be something slightly tricky like finding the sum of 3 numbers that add up to a specific number.

One thing I can recommend at a whiteboard firing squad is to see whether the firing squad has people in it that want you to win.

If you think out loud, show them you know what you're talking about, they might come out, feel your issue and work with you.

Isn't that the kind of people you want to work with regularly anyways?

I am happy to work out some trial whiteboard interviews with you if you feel that would help.

[ZhL]

Haha - whiteboard firing squad - I like that. Thank you for the offer to do a trial interview. I really appreciate that! Let me see how this week interviews go, and I may take you up on that.

As opposed to failing 2 out of 2 whiteboard interviews, the "live coding" sessions have been a mixed experience for me. It often works just fine if I'm given a clearly defined problem at the beginning of the interview and enough time to quietly think about it. It does not work very well when I'm asked behavioral questions first, coding session is limited to 20 minutes, problem keeps evolving and interviewer comes across impatient or in a rush. Solving a LeetCode/HackerRank hard problem within an hour also does not work for me. But most companies in my experience have been more reasonable than that so far.

Btw, TripleByte (no affiliation) does a much better job at technical screens in my opinion than the rest of the companies I tried so far. I wish more companies would use them.