Unpopular Take: Whiteboard Interviews Make Sense
This text is about how the very critiqued whiteboard interviewing method
(asking programming/algorithmic questions during programming
jobs interviews) actually makes a lot of sense for big companies.
We will look at the most common complaints about whiteboard type interviews and
elaborate on why they actually serve their purpose almost perfectly.
Most Common Complaints
Let's quickly look at the most popular/common things that people
complain about regarding this type of interviews.
- Being good at whiteboard type problems doesn't mean that you are good at programming.
- It does not reflect what you will be doing on the actual job.
- Preparing for these is a waste of time since it's mainly only about
remembering things that aren't really useful in "real" life.
All of the above statements are reasonable and probably true, but that doesn't
matter at all and it doesn't make these interviews bad.
The reason for these complaints is a misunderstanding of the true
purpose and essence of these interviews. We shall dive into this in the
following segment.
What's the Purpose of These Interviews?
To judge if a process is good or not it's essential to keep in mind the objective
behind said process.
An interview is meant to assess if someone will be a good fit for a particular job.
Most jobs in big tech companies aren't very technical, therefore they don't
require an insane amount of knowledge or expertise. What you want is find people
that are able to do the job properly and that fit in the mold. You need people
that will easily integrate and who agree with the enterprise's "values" (or
more frequently lack of values).
If most jobs at in these big companies aren't excessively technical and are more
related to routine/fixing stuff why would they need people that are able to
ace whiteboard interviews?
The answer is quite simple: because it's almost a guarantee that these people won't
be liabilities. Think about it, what kind of people would prepare and practice
for hours everyday for months just to get a job that a lot of people have
the technical skills for?
If you are a huge and trendy tech company and have thousands of these people
applying for a job, why wouldn't you use a very strict filter?
Clearly by using such filter you have a guarantee that the people who participate
in that circus are very devoted and dedicated (we shall see the reasons for that
later on).
By having such process big companies can easily filter liabilities. They know
that the people that can pass these interviews are either extremely tryhard or
very talented (or both). This is exactly what you want for jobs that don't
require very deep expertise in a specific subject. You want these people to do
the jobs they're told to do without causing problems. You also want them to be
somewhat independant and let the more "important" people work without disturbing
them too much. The people that can ace whiteboard tests will easily be able
to do the html/css/react/java jobs that they are asked to do without causing trouble,
meanwhile the conceptors/creators (aka the real programmers) can find solutions
to real problems that the enterprise face without much disturbance. They can
then ask the bots (devs) to do the trivial parts of the implementations.
Whiteboard interviews are a very good filter: people that participate in that
scheme are sure to be smart enough to do the actual job and are also sure to
have the desired psychological traits wanted for these jobs (see next section).
Now that we know what's the purpose of such interview process, let's find out
who's a good fit for these jobs.
The Psychology of Most FAANG Employees
If most of these jobs aren't actually very technical and interesting,
then why do all these very "smart" people apply to them? What kind of
people study for days and complete computer science courses to end up
using cringe web frameworks and doing other trivial stuff? Who are these
mad lads and what are their motivation?
A good archetype for these people would be the kid in school who was naturally
gifted at maths and always studied hard without asking himself why.
The reason probably being a desire to please his family or to achieve a certain
status. This imply a high IQ, low introspective/meta cognitive abilities, high
conscientiousness and high agreeableness. In other words, the perfect employee.
Here are more details on their psychological traits:
- Medium level of openness (intellectual curiosity and creativity). They
need to have at least average openness to be able to be independant
and do the tasks but they don't need them to have very high intellectual
curiosity (people with very high openness probably wouldn't want to center html
divs for a living anyways).
- High - very high conscientiousness (organisation/productivity/responsibility).
They to be able to do their job properly and feel responsible for their actions.
They need to be very organized, it's essential because wasting management ressources
to look at people that do trivial stuff is a big waste. They are the mechanism that
make the wheel go round, they therefore need to be reliable.
- Medium extroversion (sociability). They need to be communicative
and have a desire to do team work. This isn't a very important trait as long
as they aren't at the extremes.
- Very high agreeableness. This is probably one of the most important trait. They
need to be naturally inclined to respect authority and to not cause trouble.
They need to be respectful and to trust others. A distrust in the system would
make them question their purpose, and we can't have that can we.
- Low neuroticism (tendencies toward depression/anxiety). They need to be
mentally stable. These employees must not cause problems, they are just making
the wheel go round, they're not here to cause breaking changes or induce chaos.
- Finally and most importantly: low introspection. It's essential that these
people don't overthink their thoughts and actions. They must simply obey and
believe that they are doing something helpful for society. They are naturally
inclined to believe they are doing something right (i.e they will subconsciously
use intellectual shortcuts to fool themselves into believing that) in order
to satisfy their needs without feeling remorse. We will take a look at what
their needs are shortly.
These people aren't thinkers or creators, they are iterators. Creators develop
concepts, iterators add small things to them and keep the concepts alive.
There is only the need for a few conceptors and a lot of iterators. Ideally
creators have similar traits to iterators except that they have very high
introspection, intellectual curiosity and low agreeableness. This also implies
that they have different goals. The main goal of someone agreeable is to feel
important and part of a group, it's not truth or innovation. Therefore iterators
are much more likely to have mainstream/popular opinions, whereas conceptors
are usually more disruptive. In a company you need a few disruptive people and many
agreeable people that are smart enough to increment the ideas of the creators.
Their motivation is social status. They are willing to go as far as do intellectual
prostitution (without noticing of course) to achieve social status. As long as
the reward system of their environment gives them status they will behave without
asking themselves too many questions. They are usually politically correct and take
pseudo moralistic stances without really getting seriously involved in any
particular cause. It's just for the smoke show, they don't actually care too much
about the social causes they act like they defend. These are the people who
work for the big tech companies: the ones smart enough to do the tasks but not
smart enough to really know why.
When are Whiteboard Interviews Bad?
Almost always for the vast majority of companies. They're only good for
huge companies or companies that have good marketing.
For whiteboard
interviews to make sense you need to create an environment where you have
these high IQ low introspection individuals that compete with eachother
for a job they are probably over qualified for. This imply that the job
provides a high social status (hence why you need to be a very big company
or a very "cool" company (good marketing)).
Conclusion
The whiteboard interviews are meant to find the perfect iterators. It's a filter for these specific psychological traits and it's extremely effective. The iterators will compete with one another for the social status provided by such jobs, only the most talented or the ones that want it the most will succeed. This filters out the people that are potential liabilities with zero management overhead (doing whiteboard interviews is very easy for these big companies and costs almost nothing).