Coding Sins: Hilarious Developer Confessions
How ‘whiteboarding’ got mocked
In the year 2017, David Heinemeier Hansson, a well-known programmer and the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails coding framework, started a Developer Confessions thread on Twitter with this post:
In no time, it went viral. He ranted about interview practices in large companies — kicked off a number of tweets across many technical professions.
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Consensus being:
Riddles are bullshit, whiteboard challenges are not relevant to our actual skills and day-to-day work.
Being a software engineer myself, to some extent I concur with David.
Famous coding instructor Quincy Larson wrote in a blog post:
“The only world where you would actually need to be able to recall an algorithm would be a post-apocalyptic one, where the hard drives of all the computers connected to the internet were fried, and all copies of foundational academic papers and computer science textbooks had been reduced to ashes”
In this post, I’m going to cover the hilarious confessions of the programmers as tweets.
Tim Dierks, a Lead at Google wrote this:
While the veracity of whiteboard interviews is still debatable — people think that whiteboard interviewing is a discrete skill, much like being able to remember Pi to a thousand decimal places, Aline Lerner, the Founder of interviewing.io once said — “After drawing on data from thousands of technical interviews, it’s become clear to us that technical interviewing is a process whose results are nondeterministic and often arbitrary”.
Sarah Mei posted a series of tweets:
Four Square has publicly ditched whiteboard interviews in favor of take-home assignments.
We were concerned that [the whiteboard interview] process filtered out many other great engineers for reasons other than their abilities. Some possible reasons include variation between interviewers, candidate nervousness, or the unnaturalness of whiteboard coding generally.
As a result, Four Square has gotten rid of the random false negatives that can result from the “algorithm question lottery.
To conclude, most of the companies now rely on the pair-programming-centric interview to weed out bad candidates. Well, that makes sense. Isn’t it?
Thanks for reading. Keep Learning and coding!
