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by craftinator
1933 days ago
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> Is not the inability to think on your feet in a productive way in front of others - especially stakeholders - a gigantic red flag you want to catch? In my engineers? No. In my sales people? Yes. I want my newly hired engineers (including of the software variety) to be focused on engineering, not doing half-assed "problem solving" presentations without any preparation or analysis. That's not how problem solving works, and I want my engineers to take their time, model problems, explore different approaches, and find solutions that are well explored, documented, and proved. Conversely, being able to think/bullshit your way through live presentations without being given a chance to prepare anything is EXACTLY what I want in sales people; that skill is part of the skillset of being charismatic, and that is the skillset of people who do sales. I wouldn't turn down an engineer who turns out to be good with charisma, and the ability to come up with decent answers on the spot is something I expect senior engineers to grow into after a few years of familiarity with our problem spaces. But I certainly wouldn't select for it, much as I wouldn't select a car mechanic based on how nice their haircut looks. |
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> I want my engineers to take their time, model problems, explore different approaches, and find solutions
So, you represent "whiteboard interviews" in bad faith as 'half-assed faux problem solving', and then you state all the things that I personally believe a whiteboard interview shows about an engineer's approach.
Listen, I am sure some roles don't require someone to ever problem solve, and that's fine. But if you think a white-board interview where you get to see someone approach a new problem, vocalize their common approaches, speak about the trade-offs of their approaches, and discuss how they'd implement it is closer to "half-assed" than "modeling problems and exploring different approaches", that's a you problem and not a me problem.
Your haircut strawman is par for the course in this thread.