What kind of companies are these that their engineers need to write perfect code under severe (i.e. on the order of minutes) time constraints? Are they constantly opening sockets for Jack Bauer?
The only whiteboard questions I find useful as an interviewer are the super-easy ones that weed out the bozos who have somehow slipped through the initial filter. Things like "can you write a SQL join".
What I find most predictive are conversations with candidates about how they evaluate tradeoffs, approach system design, what do you do when you get stuck? Typically if they can pass the bozo filters and talk cluefully about these things, they will likely be a productive coder on straightforward applications. Which is most applications; many companies vastly overestimate the inherent complexity of their products.
>What kind of companies are these that their engineers need to write perfect code under severe (i.e. on the order of minutes) time constraints?
I, oddly, had to do that once in my career although I had an hour or so. Retail advertising, Cyber Monday, data pipeline is backing up severely, advertising budgets aren't updating, only other data person I can reach is drunk. Bottlenecking code is written in perl. I don't know perl. And no real testing environment. Very stressful hour of my life.
edit: Of course, such things happening often enough to note are generally a symptom of bad process and management, probably a lot of technical debt as well. So generally a workplace to avoid.
What kind of companies are these that their engineers need to write perfect code under severe (i.e. on the order of minutes) time constraints? Are they constantly opening sockets for Jack Bauer?
The only whiteboard questions I find useful as an interviewer are the super-easy ones that weed out the bozos who have somehow slipped through the initial filter. Things like "can you write a SQL join".
What I find most predictive are conversations with candidates about how they evaluate tradeoffs, approach system design, what do you do when you get stuck? Typically if they can pass the bozo filters and talk cluefully about these things, they will likely be a productive coder on straightforward applications. Which is most applications; many companies vastly overestimate the inherent complexity of their products.