When interviewing for a software engineering job, it’s common to be handed a dry erase marker and told to solve some arbitrary problem:

• “Write a function that determines if the letters in a given string can be rearranged to form a palindrome.”
• “Implement a memoization function.”
• “How would you sort an array containing up to 100,000 randomly generated integers?”

As an interviewee, I used to hate whiteboard problems. The pressure of having to understand and solve a seemingly pointless or obscure problem in front of a stranger is enough to give anyone anxiety. I’ll never actually write a merge sort during my day-to-day responsibilities as a software engineer anyway, so what’s the point?

Now, as I sit on the other end of the conversation conducting the interviews, I’m beginning to see the merit of this format. The truth is, watching someone code for 30 minutes can tell you more about them than you would ever learn by asking them a hundred theoretical questions.

In practice, a mix of theoretical questions and coding exercises is important to include in the interview. For now, though, let’s examine why the whiteboard questions are so crucial.

#programming #javascript #interview #coding-interviews #startup