Member-only story

It’s Time to End Whiteboard Interviews for Software Engineers

The most important reform to promote diversity and inclusion in your engineering organization

Anna Carey
OneZero
9 min readAug 26, 2020

Photo: Kaleidico/Unsplash

In 2017, prominent software engineers took to Twitter to confess that they would fail a whiteboard interview. A popular way to evaluate programmers of all experience levels, “whiteboarding” involves presenting candidates with a computer science problem to solve on a whiteboard in real time. Engineers have been complaining about them for years.

David Heinemeier Hansson, the founder of Ruby on Rails, one of the most successful web frameworks in history, led the way. Top developers from Google, Microsoft, and the New York Times joined in.

Yet whiteboarding still constitutes a core part of the interview process at many tech companies, especially at FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) and unicorn companies.

But the new normal of remote recruiting during the coronavirus pandemic presents an opportunity for recruiters, tech leaders, and the…

Create an account to read the full story.

The author made this story available to Medium members only.
If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us.

Or, continue in mobile web

Already have an account? Sign in

OneZero
OneZero

Published in OneZero

OneZero is a former publication from Medium about the impact of technology on people and the future. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Anna Carey
Anna Carey

Written by Anna Carey

Software engineer @Artsy. At the intersection of storytelling, art, and technology.

Responses (6)

Write a response

BEWARE:
Take-home projects where a candidate is given a few days to build a simple web app...the company could be assigning you work they need done, but don't have anyone to do. You go home, do the work (for free), give it to them, they use it, you…

Just to challenge what I think is a base assumption of the article: the goal of a whiteboard interview, or any sort of problem solving interview, shouldn't be to solve the problem (they may well have already seen the problem), it is to probe how the…

I have similar feeling about this, having had a remote coderpad interview a few weeks back. It was a horrific experience.
Happily, I’ve found another contract, but I felt compelled to document the experience here too.