Looks like she really dislikes being asked to code in an interview. She just wants to have a friendly conversation. She will be a great fit for consulting firms that bill by the hour.
For what it's worth, I hate and am doing everything I can to kill the coding interview as typically practiced.
Giving a take-home exercise and having part of the interview be a collaborative review of it? Good idea, works well.
Developing exercises where interviewer and candidate pair on a problem, using real coding tools and looking things up as necessary? Good idea, works well.
"Here's the whiteboard, here's a problem, code it up" -- doesn't usefully distinguish qualified from unqualified candidates, doesn't give you meaningful information about job-relevant skills, serves only to make people squirm and serve as a "yeah, but I had to do it to pass the interview, too, so now you do". Get rid of it forever.
Also, any set of questions designed not to determine someone's programming ability but instead to act as a proxy for something else, like "went to Stanford", goes out the window first chance I get.
If you cannot write a basic loop and if statement of maybe 10-20 lines on a whiteboard, you're going to have a hard time in a team of developers trying to collaborate in problem solving.
This is not implementing van Emde Boa search structure, but simple stuff any entry level programmer must comprehend for a general programming posistion.
I give my candidates a choice of a whiteboard or a laptop and projector. Most people choose the whiteboard. Some outright say that they need to look at it at home. The latter will not be able to participate in a meaningful way in a team, and as much as I want to, I don't have work for a loner.
But my point is that, as a team you need to be able to express ideas in a format that other developers can reason with you in a live setting. Nothing beats a whiteboard in that regard. You can use a projector and a computer, but what if you need to draw a graph or something else?
It's not a tall order to ask them to be able to do this. And please don't forget that I'm not asking people to implement RB search trees, but usually a simple loop and an if statement. Reverse a list using a for loop, transform this string into a palindrome, is this string a palindrone, remove all duplicates in a list - stuff like that.
> If you think the only way to have a coding exercise is to pose a whiteboard problem, then my advice is get out of this industry, now.
Asking coders with 10 years of experience to write 10 lines of pseudoish code is wrong!! Try avoiding a coding exercise in interviews for coding positions at all costs. In the worst case make it a take home exercise. This is the only way to save this industry!!! Got it!
That's a rather quick conclusion. In the blog post she writes that at least once she helped debugging code, so perhaps she just prefers to have some association around a problem, instead of just a bare bones problem to solve. There are many people who are like that, especially the ones who tend to "deep process" problems in their thoughts in order to gain a clear picture of it. They are probably likely to be able to solve complex problems in a domain they're familiar with, but not quite so good at solving problems without any context.
Also there's the self confidence issue, common for many people, even while not a lot of people speak out about it. Ask someone with low self confidence to stand next to a white board and "implement" solutions to random problems, and he/she will freak out. At the same time, these people might very well excel in a more nurturing, friendly environment. Yet at the same time, people who are actually self confident and able to solve problems without much context on a whiteboard, might start running in circles once faced with unfamiliar problems that do not directly map to the algorithms they already know.
I found that just talking about code or problems with someone, can tell you lots of things about the ability of a person. Also, most likely, the candidate will already have some code put online, and god forbid companies are too lazy to look at it, rather than stroking their own ego by asking out of context questions that they already know the answer to.
"Ask someone with low self confidence to stand next to a white board and "implement" solutions to random problems, and he/she will freak out. At the same time, these people might very well excel in a more nurturing, friendly environment."
I don't think a company interviewing a candidate needs to be holding their hand during the interview process. I understand that someone might perform a lot worse when whiteboarding, but an interviewer should be taking that into account.
