As someone who regularly has to try and figure out on (usually) very minimal information whether to hire someone, then barring significant contributions to open source, there aren’t any better ways to determine whether someone can cut code; tests, CV’s, college background, talk etc, may indicate someone who can cut code; someone who can do it under the artificial pressure of an interview definitely can.

Like everything it’s a trade off; you may well end up missing out on some good candidates. The upside is you can see their natural ability to cut code without the props of Google, IDE etc and how they handle themselves under pressure, all of which cab be very useful when trying to hire the best coders.

I honestly don’t mind technical questions as long as they are standard and honest. If an interviewer asks a technical question that has nothing to do with the work, that is just stupid. I had this happen to me. I recently interviewed with a fairly large sized company where for almost 45 minutes I was interviewed by two people, one very advanced technical question after another. During this interview they asked a very advanced and somewhat weird WPF question on assigning a style to a view model and then what what happen in the view if the style property on the view model changed. After I answered the question the best I could I asked ‘wow, I never even thought to do this. Do you do that a lot here?” and he said ‘actually no, we have never done that’. Not sure if he was joking or not.

After that, my whiteboard problem was ‘Write a program which takes all words in the English language and find the top five most popular 3 letter combinations’. I drew a complete blank. I got about as far as filtering for words less than 3 letters. My mind was so numb after the technical interview part I just wanted to leave and told them I cant do this. I felt so ashamed, humiliated and worthless after this interview. I’m sure there is a simple way to do this and I have yet to figure it out but frankly I have never had to do anything like this over my entire career so I figured even if I did go back to figure it out it would simply be a waste of my time. Needless to say I didnt get the job.

I had another interview that same afternoon that I was so scared I would fail as well for similar reasons. The pleasant surprise was they simply asked me questions about my work directly off my resume and dint really even throw me any curve-balls at all. No whiteboard problem or any extremely advanced questions. It was the difference between night and day. I left thinking that I had a pretty good shot at this job and even if I don’t get it at least I didn’t leave feeling like a worthless software developer.

This technical question/whiteboard problem is basically a ‘hazing’ process most programming candidates have to go through. I understand the merits of some of it and the companies trying to filter out unsuitable candidates but I also agree that many companies do seem to take pleasure in feeling superior to the candidate they are interviewing. I know not all interviewers are like this but I know for a fact at some interviews I have sensed this and I don’t think I was imaging it.

As much as we would like it to, I don’t think hard advanced technical questions and whiteboard interviewing style will ever go away. What can we do about it?