He points out many who are great at their work at all levels aren’t so hot at the whole job search / resume / interview process. As an example, he speaks of a great candidate he once tried placing for a film studio. He prepared him, got him excited how this was a major firm, a top project, with industry influentials. The candidate arrived, got nervous and sounded like an idiot. He wasn’t hired. Still, he went on to become a senior executive at a competing studio.

Adler then gives this example to differentiate what happens to otherwise competent candidates at interviews. Question #1 — What was the most important project you ever worked on? Begin talking right now. Question #2 — What was the most important project you ever worked on? Take 2 minutes to think, then start talking.

There’s a world of difference in the two. The point made is that “thinking on your feet” is not a required skill for many jobs. Software development, specifically, gets criticized for its cowboy mentality, that not enough time is spent on design.

One problem is that too many treat job interviews like a casual conversation. That’s especially true in today’s team environments that wants to paint everyone as belonging to a happy family. However, the consequences of a job interview are exponentially higher than any old chat about industry or code.

It is tough enough to get meaningful information about candidates nowadays. We managers can benefit a lot by finding means that puts candidates at ease. If we don’t, we run the risk of presenting our companies as a place that’s too much into firefighting, and therefore unattractive.

If you really want to make candidates shine and connect and see if they’re right for you, why not simulate the exact environment and project they’ll be working on if hired? That eliminates a lot of the guesswork. And if the candidate likes what he’ll be working on the way he’ll be working on it with you, that eliminates a lot of the unrevealing nervousness too.

I’ve been the interviewer and interviewee where the whiteboard, or paper solution was used. I think it served as a great tool to weed out people who couldn’t reason their way to a solution, and were likely to just copy and paste other people’s code to make things work.

I totally agree with you that the ‘blackboard’ is a dumb idea since coding isn’t about code snippets but the process of ‘creating’ a program. One needs to know a multiple languages (ie., sql, html, cfmx, javascript, etc….) and the good programmers use it as an art form. I’ve been doing this over 25 years and never had that question given to me. It would be an indiicator that lines of code and other false ideas are prevelent at that company.

Sami

Any way you slice it using a pen to write code is silly and puts undo pressure on the interviewee. It’s a power trip really – at least that’s what it feels like.

One of the places that asked me to do this (several times) wound up having an entire book written about the company – about how they couldn’t deliver software after years and years of development. I wonder if it’s because all the coders were über blackboard coders ;)

It seems, as usual, my point is falling on deaf ears.

To all those hiring people, go on and keep wondering why all these kids who grew up on computers, who do nothing but type all day every day, choke and freeze when you hand them a pen and tell them to write code.

It must be that all these new CS graduates suck, and us veteran coders who have brought several real applications to market don’t know how to write code. It couldn’t be the lame interview environment (the pen / whiteboard coding) – nah, couldn’t be that.

But it is relevant. That is my point. If you take a runner who trains at the beach all his life, and then make him run cross country, not only is he out of his element, the terrain is completely different.

For example, when I write code I don’t do it from line 1 to line 10 in a linear fashion (which is kind of required in paper form). I’ll write say public String blah(){} then backspace between the curly brackets and hit enter a few times, then start doing what I am doing. Then maybe change the return type. These things are easy with a keyboard on a computer, but writing them with a pen causes you to have to erase a lot, making you look and feel silly, which adds to the pressure. It’s just a stupid way to write code, that is why no one does it that way in reality.

The medium does matter. Most of the things I do on the keyboard are out of muscle memory which frees me to think about other things as I am doing it. It’s as if you are asked to show how to tie complicated knots but only given a pen – you are disallowed a piece of rope – Its not the right tool.

Brainstorming and designing are typically done on a whiteboard or with paper and in a group – those questions make sense to have shown on a whiteboard.

If you want to test computer programming ability, use a computer – that’s the tool people use to write code with after all

The medium is definitely relevant because programming usually goes in iterations which it easy to do with a text editor but damn hard to do on a white board.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html