| > If you were the manager at an architectural firm, would you have a candidate come in and invite them to design a bridge on a whiteboard? Let's say I were. > I know NOTHING about bridge building. Never have, beyond the basic low hanging fruit that anyone who's taken a basic physics class will be able to derive. These would be exactly the kind of things the SOCIAL aspect of that whiteboard interview would dig into. Indeed, same with software engineering. I am sure that many people would be able to solve the whiteboard problem I give; that's quite directly not the point. Instead, the point is to see if they can demonstrate their ability to say things like: * why did you use these lengths and angles? If I were to make this modification, would it have structural or design implications? * I like the structure overall, but you have "<N>" of some substructure. Why did you pick that quantity? What changes would you make if the client requested more or less to keep a similar feel? The person would then be able to demonstrate that they don't know NOTHING about bridge building and simply recreated a thing they luckily knew the shape of, but instead dig into first principles, emergent properties, tradespaces that emerged from their design decisions, and why they navigated said tradespace how they did. > What an odd response Right, I'm talking about how social skills are an important part of being in a workplace - you do, after all, interact with your coworkers up to 40h a week - and then this fellow tells a story about how he as a senior engineer told a new hire they were "fucking irritating" him as a demonstration of his superior social skills, and now you're trying to pull this? Unbelievable. > It's simply bullshit > makes you and your company look like a fucked up hiigh school, full of pedantic pedgagogy > You don't have sales people do quadratic formulas > Disgusting You're quite unpleasant, and arguing directly in bad faith > Engineering skills are highly valued for engineering roles And the ability to communicate is a critical Engineering skill. How on earth everyone in this thread thinks asking an Engineer to talk for 45 minutes about a problem is analogous to asking a sales crew to derive a quadratic formula would've been beyond me, but I've seen about 100 strawmans in this thread. Design work is not a VERY small slice of the pie unless you're entrenched in some org with humungous momentum and years of technical planning accomplished for you. In that case, you can probably afford to hire anti-social fucks who will just sit in their cave and code by themselves, never collaborating, failing to share critical business knowledge because talking to someone else isn't in their job description. |