Ask HN: Do other fields of engineering have an equivalent to whiteboarding? - aphextron
======
crdb
Not quite engineering, but related:

Professional orchestras have auditions, where you will perform a piece from
the solo repertoire in front of the head of the section you are auditioning
for, and a few other key staff (e.g. [1]). Some auditions will include
orchestral parts, and you can buy books of famous solos for most instruments.

This repertoire has little in common with the kind of playing you will be paid
for, other than as a pure display of technical ability (just like
whiteboarding). For example, it is relatively poor as a gauge of the ability
to play with others (accompanists follow you, not the other way around), or of
your fitting in with the rest of your section.

Even on a technical level, performing a showy piece well in the few minutes of
the audition does not mean you have the stamina to sustain this playing
through four hours of Wagner.

[1] "The jury consists of 25 members of the orchestra: two of four
concertmasters, the principals, the VPO chairman and managing director, five
musicians of the relevant orchestra section, two staff council members from
the Vienna State Opera Orchestra, and a representative of the Vienna State
Opera’s management." \-
[http://web.archive.org/web/20141203022823/http://slippedisc....](http://web.archive.org/web/20141203022823/http://slippedisc.com/2014/11/pictures-
at-an-audition-for-the-vienna-philharmonic)

~~~
BigCatStuff
When auditioning, would the applicant know which pieces of music they will be
required to perform beforehand? I am assuming that they do, which would make
it very different from 'whiteboarding' from a software engineering interview.

In software engineering interviews, most of the time the interviewer will try
to have prepared questions that the interviewee has NOT seen before. To make
it more like an audition, the questions would need to be provided beforehand
so that the interviewee could practice them.

~~~
gnud
It's not unusual for auditions to music schools to include either 'prima
vista' \- where you play from the sheet - or 'secunda vista' \- where you get
a few minutes of prep time.

~~~
casion
I auditioned at a number of schools and prima vista was the only thing.

At a few of the auditions they would interrupt you if it appeared that you
knew the piece and give you something else.

Honestly rather annoying. Even though I entered teaching, I did a lot of time
in the pit and sight reading was never a skill that was needed. I can
understand the need to weed out people with no/basic reading skills, but the
idea that you need to be high-level fluency (particularly with oddly notated
pieces!) is nonsense.

The worst part was that most students just gamed it. They would purposely
ritard some part just to make it look like they weren't familiar with a piece
they could play blindfolded. The net result is that the school I ended up
selecting had a number of non-fluent readers that wasted everyone's time at
some point because they were so slow!

/rant

------
mgberlin
Chemistry has whiteboarding, but instead of writing algorithms or code, you're
expected to be able to draw structures, reactions, and synthesis. It's also
similar in that this is not necessarily a core part of most chemists everyday
job, but something you study for to be able to interview or give presentations
regarding your research.

~~~
dnautics
I've never heard of whiteboarding a chemical reaction mechanism. Usually since
most chemists at a comparable 'engineering level' to programmers are phds, a
seminar is expected, and the candidate has something ready to go. It's an
opportunity for the team to learn something new while assessing the critical
thinking skills of the candidate during the q&a

~~~
jballanc
I've witnessed it in the post-seminar lab visits. It bears little resemblance
to the "whiteboard interview" from the developer world, but if you're visiting
with a faculty member after you present your work, they may ask you to help
them understand some piece of your work by drawing out the mechanism.

I'll disagree with the GP, though, on its applicability to "real-world" work.
When I did chemistry, diagraming out a reaction mechanism and pondering it
over with colleagues gathered in front of the chalkboard was a daily activity.

~~~
dnautics
sure, but it's not like the employer tells the prospective employee to figure
out a mechanism that is not related to the employee's former work (for
example, a reaction recently discovered in the employer's lab, or a general
reaction that "all good organic chemists should know" \- like "show me how
dansihevsky's diene works, and apply it to the synthesis of this molecule that
you've never seen before") Hah damn. I don't want to give the chemists ideas.

------
yessql
I haven't experienced it, but I've only had a couple interviews/jobs as an
electrical engineer before switching to software, where they happen almost
every time.

I think it's a sign that universities are failing to be trusted as
credentialing institutions. You should be able to verify a degree and conclude
from that the person learned the material.

I guess this is why the professional engineering exams exist.

~~~
lazulicurio
Completely just my opinion, but I think this is because most people (both
employers and potential employees) are focusing on the more vocational aspects
of programming, whereas university is more theory-based.

I know that I would not have gotten as much out of my degree if I hadn't had
prior experience with programming prior to university. It's tough to
appreciate why complexity analysis is important if you've never personally
experienced a program running slow because you chose a poor algorithm.

And most employers aren't looking for that level of theoretical knowledge.
They're looking for people who can quickly get up to speed with the
development environment, who can break down a problem into smaller logical
chunks, and who can translate those chunks into working code.

If neither employers nor students care about the theoretical knowledge, then
what is the point of going for that degree? (IMO, the best course of action
would be a few years of on-the-job training, then going to university once you
have enough experience to appreciate the theoretical stuff. But that would be
a huge culture clash with how things are currently done).

~~~
closeparen
I could not disagree more strongly that university is theory-based. The three-
class theory sequence I took was a mildly annoying sideshow. The meat of my
university's CS program was in Networks and Distributed Systems, Database
Systems, Operating Systems, Programming Languages, Functional Programming,
Computer Security, Parallel Computing, Sensing and Perception, Machine
Learning, Graphics, Scientific Visualization, etc.

Each had a lecture/exam component, but it was minor. The classes mostly
centered on a set of programming projects, implementing foundational
components in the topic area from a specification and a skeleton. (IRC server,
TCP stack, IP router, Paxos, Byzantine Generals, Raft, b-trees, query parser,
thread scheduler, syscalls, filesystem, interpreter, RSA, D-H key exchange,
authenticated encrypted channel, concurrency primitives and then concurrent
algorithms that use them, sensor fusion, geometric transformations, shading,
texture mapping, ray tracing, etc). No one I know took _all_ of these classes,
but we all took most of them.

Proofs are theoretical knowledge. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau are theoretical
knowledge. I did plenty of that too. This isn't theoretical knowledge, it's
breadth. It's knowing what's involved in the systems adjacent to the code we
write, inside the libraries we rely on. It's an understanding of what problems
they're solving internally, why they might be acting up, and what to do about
it. It's demystifying the rest of the computing environment, pulling back the
curtain on abstractions. It's a whole bunch demonstrated ability to write
complex programs for complex purposes subjected to rigorous test suites, under
far more realistic conditions than any whiteboard interview.

A few years of on-the-job training will teach you what matters for your
specific job, right now.

Though we didn't have such a class, a degree capstone might have been "given a
CPU emulator, write a secure distributed database engine on your network stack
in your SML interpreter on your operating system." It wouldn't have the
performance optimizations that modern, widely-used components have accumulated
over the last half-century, but it would work.

~~~
avh02
jeez, what uni is this? I kind of like the sound of it.

~~~
closeparen
The University of Chicago. [0]

[0]
[http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/thecollege/computerscienc...](http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/thecollege/computerscience/)

~~~
avh02
i'm doing my MSc now at a decent uni, i kind of wish i did my undergrad at a
decent one too.

oh well.

------
cagenut
It kills me that "whiteboarding" has become shorthand for "bad developer
interview technique". Meanwhile I'm over here whiteboarding my ass off as a
communication tool for complex systems where its much more effective to walk
someone through it as you draw it than to present pre-made slides. I love
whiteboarding.

~~~
yulaow
Whiteboarding or any way of writing notes/diagrams on paper or on any sharable
medium is an extremly good communication tool, no one would say otherwise.

Said that, it is ALSO a very bad developer interview technique.

Think if anytime you use it to communicate with a team coworker you had to
feel like "I must make this good in these next 20minutes or I am getting
fired" (with the bonus of not knowing what the whiteboarding will be about)
and this is how feels a potential candidate when doing these types of
interviews

~~~
EduardoBautista
Being able to work under pressure is also a skill.

------
macromackie
I've found the interview process for management consulting roles to be
surprisingly similar to tech interviews.

Most interviews are presented as cases[1] where students/applicants have to
analyze and propose a strategy to handle example client situations in ~60m.

I've found that the people who have the most success with the interviewing
process are the ones who do the most mock and focus on optimizing their skill-
set for the interviews, rather than for the actual positions (which is
unfortunately similar to tech recruiting and algo/whiteboarding problems).

There is also a ton of online case prep[2] and training materials specifically
for the interview process, akin to CareerCup/CTCI/HackerRank/etc.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_interview](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_interview)
[2][http://www.consultingcase101.com/tag/free-sample-
case/](http://www.consultingcase101.com/tag/free-sample-case/)

~~~
abuteau
Agreed on your comment (ex software dev, now management consultant)..

In MC, the delivery of the case is extremely important (how you structure the
solution, how you speak, how you present yourself, etc.). Your point on people
optimizing is spot on. Some students spend 10-20 hours a week practising
before a McKinsey, Bain, BCG interview..

When I'm building cases and interviewing people, I try to structure it around
a real life problem we have (e.g. a wood/fiber B2B company wanting to go B2C)
which makes it less awkward than solving random algorithms.

However, I'm still not satisfied with the process, so wondering if people have
ideas ?

I thought about giving a case to solve at home, but we're missing the part of
how an applicant will react with a lot of pressure and in front of clients :/

~~~
mpfundstein
Hey, cool story! May I ask how you got into MC? How old where you? How long
have you been a Software Dev? Did you do an MBA?

------
jasonkolb
It's really sad to me that whiteboard is thought of as an interviewing tool.
Opened this thread thinking "cool, maybe there are some brainstorming
techniques I haven't heard of from other industries" and there's only stuff
about interviewing techniques.

Maybe I can help. If I need to explore some ideas and there's no whiteboard
handy I write on the windows instead. Gotta be prepared when inspiration hits!

~~~
kk_cz
extra-points for using permanent markers if whiteboard markers are not handy

------
NikolaeVarius
I had whiteboarding with aeronatuical engineering. Had to draw out pressure
velocity graphs along a turbofan engine and describe exactly what happened
every step of the way and why it happened,

------
ronilan
I work as a snowboard instructor. Training. Certifications. Interviews. The
job itself. It's White and Board all the way down.

------
zerr
Another relevant question - does "Sports/competitive <field>" (similar to
Competitive Programming, i.e. Olympiad and code/hacker/lity/rank sites) thing
exist at all? Such that the tasks are completely different to what one might
expect to do on the job.

So e.g. if there is a "Competitive Bridge-Engineering" and the problems are
completely different compared to bridge-engineers day job.

To continue this theme - in case you have an opening for bridge engineer -
isn't it enough to discuss the previous 5 bridges the candidate has built and
maybe also discuss the _relevant_ details the current bridge project entails?
Do such bridge-engineers also get irrelevant questions?

~~~
jeff_petersen
> if there is a "Competitive Bridge-Engineering

Not really related to job interviews, but West Point used to do a bridge
engineering competition (maybe they still do) where you downloaded a software
package and had to design a bridge that could withstand the highest load for
the smallest cost. It was pretty accessible and kind of fun to mess around
with. I never submitted any solutions, but I think the prize was a
scholarship.

------
otterley
Not "whiteboarding" as such, but during my wife's last job search as a UX/UI
designer, she was required to participate in a series of design exercises as a
part of the evaluation process. Usually these were in the middle of a series
of interviews; and typically those involved a few hours' work mocking up a
series of high-level designs -- wireframes, interaction flows, etc. Unlike a
whiteboarding exercise, they weren't made in a room with the interviewer.

------
pitaj
Yes. In my recent Electrical Engineering interview, I didn't literally
whiteboard but we did go over some simple problems that a person at my point
in college should know.

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lithos
When interviewing for a field tech (electrical TS&R work) position I've been
put in front of unfamiliar equipment to troubleshoot.

Some companies will end up sending you for testing. Which normally have less
than a 5%-10% pass rate.

Although the entire process is far more pragmatic than programmer interviews
from what I've seen here. I was also able to expect far more replies back with
results than programmers do here.

------
deepnotderp
EE occasionally has simple circuit stuff on a whiteboard.

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peterwwillis
Teaching has blackboarding. You pass only if you can write completely
unintelligible complicated formulas in the tiny margins of something
unrelated.

------
mhluongo
Whiteboarding in the design sense, or interview sense?

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olliej
I kind of wonder whether forestry engineering has it? as mgberlin says
chemistry makes sense, process engineering also seems like it would make
sense.

But i /feel/ that larger scale (civil, etc) would not? I mean i kind of
imagine civil, forestry, etc would be more portfolio driven?

~~~
thearn4
I think some of the physical engineering disciplines are at least partially
gate-kept and signal applicant value through membership to professional
organizations and certifications (FE & PE exams, etc.)

------
tastyham
Other engineering fields have exams, certifications, and licenses strictly
controlled by professional boards and/or the government.

------
uieefx
As an EE, never beyond systems layouts, but it was to guide a discussion...not
a test

