[brianwawok]

I have pseudo-coded on blackboards many times, which is really what a blackboard coding interview should be. If you get a ding for writing .foreach instead of .forEach, that seems a bit picky ;)

However I realize I may have a bias as I do ok on most blackboard coding interviews I have done.. maybe been stumped 1 time out of 15 or so in my life? Some of it is a skill, that the more you do the better you get at it, but being good at it does not make you good at actual coding.

[istorical]

It's exactly like being good at academic test taking.

I'm very good at memorization (of facts, ideas/concepts, and procedures/algorithms) and that allowed me to do well in my younger years and in standardised testing, so I always just scoffed when I heard other people complain about how it was a poor proxy for knowledge / abilities.

Of course, now I'm terrible at pretty much all the standard ways of interviewing developers (...here's where you say I'm probably just a bad developer) and now I have all this past-due empathy for those I disregarded before.

[vonmoltke]

> I have pseudo-coded on blackboards many times, which is really what a blackboard coding interview should be. If you get a ding for writing .foreach instead of .forEach, that seems a bit picky ;)

In my experience, some interviewers, particularly Amazon interviewers, get really anal about putting correct code on a whiteboard, sheet of paper, or bare text document. I personally do not when giving interviews.

My bigger problem, and I seem to depart from the vocal majority on this, is that my preferred normal workflow does not use whiteboards for anything besides task lists and diagrams. In 13 years[1] as an engineer I have never written actual or pseudocode on a whiteboard outside of an interview. I rarely do it on paper. I have never worked with anyone who did this very much, either.

[1] Granted, four of those were as an EE, but I still had to deal with code from time to time

[dpark]

> In my experience, some interviewers, particularly Amazon interviewers, get really anal about putting correct code on a whiteboard

I had that experience with an Amazon interviewer. The guy who told me he expected perfect code also gave me zero feedback as I worked (despite me literally asking if I was headed in the direction he expected) and spent the entire time staring at his laptop. He'd apparently forgotten that he was scheduled for an interview, and also his manners.

[odonnellryan]

I was asked recently by a big company to code some classes in Python, on paper. They then questioned my indentation, syntax, and case-sensitivity multiple times!

A valid question, but paper-code?

[brianwawok]

Hah that is pretty terrible. In fact, I don't think Python is a very good language to code on paper due to the indentation side of things. Maybe graph paper would help?

[odonnellryan]

Maybe! Or just understand it isn't easy for anyone to indent things on paper haha.