
Ask HN: Value in Forcing Whiteboard Coding Interviews? - tiredinterviews
I&#x27;ve been coding professionally for 10 years and otherwise for over 20 years.  However I know myself, I don&#x27;t do well on whiteboard coding interviews.<p>Because of this, I bring my own laptop to ask if I can code on.  In general as the rooms you could be white board coding on are conference rooms, they almost always (i.e. I have never encountered otherwise) a monitor that one can project one&#x27;s laptop onto.  However, I&#x27;m not always given permission and sometimes am forced to code on a whiteboard.  In practice, my experience is that smaller companies are more willing to allow me to do use my laptop, while the big names are less willing (you can guess who they are)<p>I feel that any company that feels it supports people who are not neurotypical but doesn&#x27;t allow this, is fooling themselves (one might even argue discriminating against a class of people).  I&#x27;m fairly typical, but I have learned about myself that I have a very difficult time organizing my coding thoughts (as opposed to design thought) on a white board.  It&#x27;s the closest I have come to understanding what dyslexic people must experience when they read, I simply don&#x27;t perceive code written out longhand the same way that I perceive code in a fixed width font on my screen.  I write code as I&#x27;d type it on my laptop, but then I get lost, I&#x27;m looking at the code on the whiteboard, but I&#x27;m not processing it.<p>From my perspective, I don&#x27;t see the value of forcing one to code on a whiteboard vs a laptop.  I do see the value in forcing one to do design work on a whiteboard.  In the former case, it bares no similarity to the way almost all engineers work day in and day out, while in the later case it does.<p>Am I missing something?  Is their a particular value that whiteboard coding shows off that coding on a laptop does not?<p>[I realize similar questions have been asked in the past on hacker news, but perhaps my perspective is new]
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SamReidHughes
One upside is that you're giving everybody the same test, so you don't have
miscalibrated judgements of a candidate's ability, depending on if they used a
computer.

It occurs to me now that another upside might be that it could have better
predictive value. Maybe inability to deal with whiteboard code implies
inability to deal with large code bases or complicated situations where you
have to hold what the code's doing in your head. Or maybe that gets lost in
the noise...

