Dmitriy
Dmitriy
Jul 25, 2017 · 1 min read

The goal of standard whiteboard coding interviews is assess your ability to solve new problems that you haven’t seen before. That is absolutely relevant to work.

That is the ideal (like Plato ideal) goal, but that’s where it starts to crack — you never solve new problems on white board, ever. You do your research to find if somebody/is did it before and pick the best, or if you are first you spend a day drawing/coding different approaches, which you then (hopefully) narrow down by impact and priorities. I mention priorities, because too many developers narrow by performance, which might be a low priority for company or group, features, security etc might be higher on the list for this particular business.

The only time I did whiteboard it was to re-invent buble sort, which I knew about, but never implemented. Needless to say I never implemented any sorts in this company. All my time was spent fixing the CF they made out of ms sql database (they tried to make it into key/value store). And there never was a question on my db mastery.

    Dmitriy

    Written by

    Dmitriy