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Discussion on: Do whiteboard interviews still exist? 🤔

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Shawn Sommer

I haven't had a whiteboard interview in either developer position I have held. However, there was a "code" component to each.

The first job, I was still in school. After getting through the talky part of the interview I was asked to take a seat next to my future boss by his desk. He pulled up a chunk of code and asked me if I could explain what it does. I stumbled a bit because it was my first time even looking at in-production code(he literally opened up their code base and pointed to a method for me to describe to him). It was a basic database query with some data manipulation that was dropped into a data table. I explained to him that I had never seen a datatable(for some reason this wasn't covered in school despite having multiple semesters focused on C#) before but it appeared to be grabbing multiple rows from the database via the query. Long story short, I got the job.

The second job I got I had 3+ years in doing .NET dev but was interviewing for a position requiring me to learn their entire tech stack. They sent me home with a coding project. It was basically to mock an API call with an allotted time of 1 hour in the language of my choosing. I was working with a pretty vague definition (which they said was intentional). I didn't quite finish in the time allotted but got pretty darn close. It was close enough for them to decide to hire me as well.