Show HN: Whiteboardfree – Developer Jobs at Companies That Don't Whiteboard - <AUTHOR> https://whiteboardfree.com/ <comment><USER2> I've been using whiteboards for 2 decades during the interview process and they work great, if you ask the right questions. I've built great engineering teams at companies like Orbtiz and whiteboards were one of our best tools.

The reason they are important is that they are part of every engineers day-to- day work. We use them to collaborate and design and understand.

Therefore, if a candidate can't whiteboard a design, solution, architecture, etc. in a manner that other engineers can understand it, they are going to struggle.

That being said, the way Google and other companies use whiteboards is an epic fail. Asking someone to code on a whiteboard is stupid. Asking them to solve algorithm puzzlers on a whiteboard is lame. This isn't how we use whiteboards every day so why should a candidate be expected to use them this way during an interview.

<comment><USER3> An important thing to remember is that broken/not-broken is completely different for each side of that desk: candidate person & hiring person. This is always the case for selection steps.

The employer (or school, etc) wants to make successful hires and to avoid bad ones. False positives are always a big problem. False negatives are usually much smaller one. A process is good if it produces good hires, and no bad ones.

In principle, a process that hires 3 good candidates from a pool containing 5 good candidates and lots of bad ones is good. Avoiding bad hires is paramount. Missing 2 good hires is not as bad as making one bad hire, not near as bad usually.

Most employers don't care about false negatives at all. If they do, they probably care most about missing _really_ good outlier hires, not mistakenly selecting the 5th best candidate instead of the 4th. The only reason to care is fairness. People instintively care about fairness so this affects practices but it's not nearly like false positives.

Employers that need huge volume (eg, the army) are the only ones that care about false positives as much as candidates do.

The candidate (student etc.) generally feels the process is "broken" when it is _unfair_ to them. Unfair means that a person could have done the job well, but cannot get hired. Ie, if the candidate is a "false negative" then the process is broken.

Anyway... When things become systemic, the "brokenness" becomes acute to a candidate. If whiteboards (your architecture version, Google's CS version or any other version) are prevelant and you suck at them... you can't get hired. There _are_ people who suck at your test (whatever it is) but would be good at the job. Your proxy _is_ a biased against some people, every proxy is.

Like I said, a lot of things are like this. One side is working the numbers game, the other side isn't. Insurance markets, college entrance, executive appointments, PayPal's fraudster detection (bastards!), credit scores, investment (even startup investment)...

<comment><USER4> I agree that most companies don't care about false negatives.

The problem is that very few companies know how much false negatives are costing them, so it is very difficult to evaluate whether the false negatives are—cough—a negligible tradeoff against weeding out the false positives.

False positives are right in your face. But it is nearly impossible to systematically keep track of the candidates that aren't hired to see if they are successful elsewhere.

So people lean towards eliminating false positives at all costs. It's another variation on "Looking for the watch where the light is better."

<comment><USER5>
       It's another variation on "Looking for the watch where the light is better."

This really doesn't fit. If there are dozens of watches scattered around, of course you first look where the light is good.

These situations aren't at all symmetric. A false positive always costs you (the company). A false negative is only a cost to you if you fail to hire well for that position.

Also the fact that a candidate you passed on does well elsewhere doesn't mean you were wrong to pass on them (it could, but it's not clear).

<comment><USER4> I was not equating this to a scenario where you are only looking for one watch. The expression (and anecdote behind it) is also used to describe managing according to metrics that are easy to collect, often at the expense of outcomes.

That applies in the case of caring more about false positives than false negatives, since nobody (or close enough) even knows how many false negatives they have.

Your statement that someone being successful elsewhere doesn't prove we have a false negative underscores the uncertainty involved. It doesn't invalidate what I'm saying in the least.

But if we want to be rigorous, we could do some direct testing. Let's say we give a telephone screening and four interviews to each candidate. Simpkifying somewhat, let's say that our policy is that a fail on any one eliminates the candidate.

If we hire lots of people, we can collect false positive and false negative stats by randomly passing someone who fails exactly one test.

If a lot of people who fail a particular test end up succeeding, we can infer that the test provides false negatives.

On the other hand, if everyone who gets the random "free pass" on one particular test ends up failing, we can presume it has low false negatives, and maybe abandon the random passes for that test.

<comment><USER5> I understood the analogy you were trying to draw, I just disagree with it.

The original joke/anectdote works because it leads to clearly suboptimal search - the guy knows his watch isn't near the streetlight, but he's looking there because he can see.

This is a very different situation. To abuse the analogy further, the guys best bet to find a watch seems to be just looking near the streetlight. After all, not only can you see better there, but most of the watches are near there too.

<comment><USER6> What your opponent is saying is that the cost of false negatives is unknown because it's hard to calculate. So people only calculate the cost of of false positive because it's easy to calculate then compare it to the unknown value and conclude that it's greater, not dissimilar to the gentleman who had been looking for the watch under a streetlight.

Your saying "false negative is only a cost to you if you fail to hire well for that position" could be easily disproved with examples of people, who were rejected and started their own competitive business (e.g. [1]). IMHO, one of the goals of having 10Ks of engineers on staff is to keep them from the competition. But since nobody is tracking this and the extreme cases like WhatsApp can be hand-waved away it's easy to pretend that the false negative's cost is miniscule.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#History)

<comment><USER5> If I'd seen any evidence that this cost wasn't minuscule int the typical case, I'd be much more interested in expending the effort to try and measure it better and act on that - but that has an opportunity cost also. So you are suggesting incur a real cost just in case? I don't buy it.

The guy with the watch analogy only works if there is good reason to believe he'd be better off searching elsewhere. But we don't appear to have that here....

<comment><USER6> I am not sure you checked out the link I've given. It's quite a substantial evidence that not hiring Koum and Acton might have costed FB somewhere around $19B if one were to believe WhatsApp was acquired to neutralize competition and not for its amazing revenue.

Let's be generous and say the WhatsApp was a 10x unicorn so FB overpayed only 9B for it. Which makes 4.5B loss per false negative on each founder. If a false positive was, on average, 1M loss (which is an extremely generous in an organization such as FB in my recollection), it means you could have had 4000 false positives for each of these negatives and still come ahead.

And, it brings us back to the Type I and II errors - it's always cheaper to make one, which has a limited downside than the unknown (potentially very high one). Typical example given is that while you are on the way to an expensive cruise you realize that you might have forgotten to turn off the stove. If you go back you might miss your 10K cruise. If you cary on, you might lose you 1M house. On average, people who miss cruise in such circumstances fare much better than ones, who risk their houses.

<comment><USER5> I know that story - but think it is enough of an outlier (regardless of how it went down) to basically be irrelevant to almost all hires. The idea that people are routinely filtering out great hires in their thousands in ways that come back to haunt them ... doesn't seem plausible.

I get what you guys are saying, there just doesn't seem to be real evidence that is an issue nearly all cases. Whatsapp notwithstanding

<comment><USER6> No, the idea is that you don't know what you are filtering out. As I said - it's extremely easy to just hand-wave. And if you want to believe that you know the unknown downside I am not the one to persuade you otherwise. But acknowledging that it's just a personal belief not only unsubstantiated but contradicted by data could be a good first step :)

<comment><USER5> I think we are talking past each other. I have never said I know the unknown, that would be silly. But funds,entsllu can't avoid false negatives without degrading other performance , assuming some reasonable things. Even without those assumption, there is a very real cost to what you are suggesting. You seem to be waving off this cost.

So in order for it to make sense to spend that money, you want some evidence there will be a positive return. Far from contradicting my position, what limited data I have seen does not support that effort, at least in the general case. Certainly whatsapp and the like don't speak to it - they are very much outliers.

By all means try it. If your false positive rate explodes it will be an expensive lesson, but that's always a risk.

One last point, the idea that nobody thinks about this and try's thinks is laughable , which is worth noting because some comments in this thread almost suggest that it's true,.

<comment><USER6> > You seem to be waving off this cost.

With my example of sacrificing a 10K cruise for a chance to not lose a 1M home, I figure?

> Far from contradicting my position, what limited data I have seen does not > support that effort, at least in the general case.

Indeed, the data does not contradict a statement "on average, false positives are 4.5B each", which nobody has argued. However, it does contradict the statement "false negatives have any cost only when you are unable to fill the position as the result", which you have made in this thread.

>One last point, the idea that nobody thinks about this and try's thinks is laughable , which is worth noting because some comments in this thread almost suggest that it's true,.

Again, it would be silly to say that nobody thinks about it. Evidently, a number of people think the same way you do.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps they do that because it has proven out over time. At any rate, we're well past diminishing returns here, so I'm out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We don't whiteboard at my company, as we favor a take home technical exercise and debrief/walkthrough format for interviewing our engineers. That being said, I'm super turned off by the incessant whining from the community about various interviewing practices. Here's the tough truth I think: Some companies simply do not understand how to properly engage in employee selection. They get some quick guidance from a google search and have too much autonomy in the process to make their own decisions because the company hasn't really empowered their talent processes to be well thought out and planned. This happens frequently. The real shame in it all it that it focuses the conversation on these high level exercises - be it coding on a white board or rallying against take home exercises or demanding to be paid for interview work, and ultimately to the employer you're put in a spot where you can't help but feel a little reactionary as the transactionality of the relationship is constant: I need to know you can do the work, prove to me you can, I will then hire you and pay you to work.

What a cluster it's all becoming on the software engineering side.

<comment><USER8> > a take home technical exercise

> prove to me you can (do the work)

A take home exercise only proves they can get the work done elsewhere. It doesn't prove that they actually did it.

<comment><USER9> This whole thing misses the point. We need WhiteboardFreeAndAlsoTakeHomeFree. In other industries, my resume and a quick discussion verifying that I actually did the work I said I did is suffficient

<comment><USER10> So say you are at a job. fairly happy. Maybe not your dream job, but you decide to look around and interview with me.

I could present you two options:

1) I just hire you after a 30 minute chat. 50% you don't work out, and we fire you after 30 days.

2) We have a longer interview. We whiteboard. We take home test. We whiteboard some more. 90% chance that you don't get fired after 30 days.

Which would you prefer? As a business owner, I am happy to just try people I don't know well - IFF they are willing to accept that there is a very good chance they are fired within the first 30 days.

There is such a huge range in developers. The haves vs the have-nots can be a 100x different productivity difference. I really want to try to tease that difference out. It is really really hard.

<comment><USER11> > 1) I just hire you after a 30 minute chat. 50% you don't work out, and we > fire you after 30 days.

Personally, that's my preference. If I don't think I can do the job I'll know after a 30 minute chat.

<comment><USER12> Same here. I feel I have vastly more control of my work performance over the course of 30 days than I have control of the assessment of 6 interviewers after seeing me for 30 minutes.

In other words, I think there is far more than 50% chance that things work out after 30 days and far less than 50% chance that I impress 6 interviewers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Might be worth clarifying whether this is "don't use a whiteboard during interviews" or "don't ask candidates to code obscure algorithms" on a whiteboard.

We use a whiteboard in our interviews for sketching UI, and sometimes drawing a database table. Generally candidates find this much easier than talking through their design, and we think that interview very closely represents what we do on a day to day basis.

<comment><USER14> There was a good article that popped up on here a couple months ago about this: "Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry". [1]

If you're asking candidates to balance a binary search tree when no one in the history of your company has ever had to do that, you're asking the wrong questions.

[1] [http://prog21.dadgum.com/177.html](http://prog21.dadgum.com/177.html)

<comment><USER13> Yep. Which is why we don't.

We do a mock technical meeting with multiple members of our tech team and the candidate presenting options, talking through pros and cons, etc. Much of the interview is about assessing communication rather than technical skills.

The interview is basically a standard tech meeting that we hold regularly in the team to discuss designs of new projects.

<comment><USER14> Sorry — that comment was meant in support of yours, with the "you" being generic :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was just speaking with a co-worker about how I consider this interview culture to be a race to the bottom in how much unpaid work companies are getting from prospective employees. When I interviewed with Facebook they do back to back whiteboard interviews for about 6+ hours then sometimes they give "homework" problems, etc. Even skilled candidates can't refuse because a less skilled candidate will come along willing to make the sacrifice.

I don't have any solutions only complaints and bitterness, sorry.

<comment><USER16> At my startup we pay interviewees a decent hourly consulting rate for take- home problems or full-day followup onsites (after the first interview).

We only do them when we are pretty excited about a candidate but need more information to make a hiring decision.

It's cheap, really, considering the cost of sourcing candidates and the cost of making a bad hiring decision.

<comment><USER17> When I'm looking for a job, I usually have 3 or 4 strong prospects and looking back on my spreadsheets that I keep when I am looking, it usually takes about 2 weeks from the time I reach out to my network of recruiters and I have an offer (the shortest was 4 days from looking to having an offer from what was then a top 10 Fortune 500 company).

Why would I go through that trouble? I have 20+ years of experience that I can explain how I architected and developed from the website, to the middle tier, to the database to multiple VPCs on AWS and dev ops. I'm not going to do homework.

When I was first starting out I might, but living in a major metro area that's not on the west coast, there are more openings for senior devs/architects than people to fill them.

If a company wants to try me out, I'm more than willing to do a contract to perm, but my hourly rate is going to be enough to cover self employment taxes, make up for not getting paid for time off and at least two or three weeks between employment.

<comment><USER18> > If a company wants to try me out, I'm more than willing to do a contract to > perm, but my hourly rate is going to be enough to cover self employment > taxes, make up for not getting paid for time off and at least two or three > weeks between employment.

What does that number look like? 10k a week?

<comment><USER17> For a 1099 contract where I'm responsible for my own self employment taxes....

2080 - hours in a work year

-80 Paid Holidays

-120 Paid Time off

-120 Gap between employment (based on my history)

= 1760 work hours per year

FTE Salary * .028 (Employer Medicare Contribution) + $7967 (maximum social security amount - 128500*.062) = minimum salary

minimum salary/1720 hours = pay rate.

Take a reasonable salary for my market as $140,000, that is about $152000/1720 = $88.37/hour minimum.

Adjust the number based on market, skill set, and the amount of time you estimate between jobs. I'm also not taking into account health benefits that you would need to pay yourself because I'm covered under my wife, or 401K matching. I would add 4% to the hourly rate to cover 401K matching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Whiteboards are not the problem- rather the questions that candidates are asked are bad.

Asking someone to solve an obscure mathematical problem (the Two Egg problem seems to be in fashion) doesn't do much except test whether the candidate has memorized the answer.

<comment><USER20> Whiteboard problems are used to show that you can work through a problem, while communicating well about your thought process. They're also good general intelligence tests, if administered correctly.

<comment><USER21> I think an obvious reason for this type of interview problems is because developers at work usually talk loudly while solving problems and write code without the help of any external resource while the clock is ticking in the background. Oh, wait...

<comment><USER22> What both you and the parent post you're deriding are missing is white- boarding (when done correctly) isn't about the _problem_ at all. It's just an easy way to get a candidate in the room and construct a technical conversation.

As an employer I don't care how great your skills are, if you can't walk me through your thought process for 45 minutes you're not going to be overly successful. If you can't incorporate feed back or engage when pressed to change your design you're probably not going to be successful.

Do your recruiting right and you shouldn't need the white board to simulate whether the candidate can code at all (I think white-boarding with the intent of looking for named algorithms is a waste of everyone's time), instead you want to see if they can synthesize information, engage with other people, and otherwise display the soft skills that tend to be much more useful metrics for employee success than coding aptitude.

Granted, my industry is known for not having deep coding problems to solve, this strategy might not be as useful in verticals that require more technology chops.

<comment><USER23> >As an employer I don't care how great your skills are, if you can't walk me through your thought process for 45 minutes you're not going to be overly successful. If you can't incorporate feed back or engage when pressed to change your design you're probably not going to be successful.

The post you're responding to makes a great point that this isn't the normal working environment for 99% of actually-writing-code developers. I discuss and iterate designs with my coworkers/leads/managers/architects just fine, but a surprise algorithmic problem you have to simultaneously solve, draw on a whiteboard, and constantly present to an audience while being timed isn't something I have been great at. I bet many others aren't either. I got good at it after a few interviews last time I was looking for a job; but if I hit the interview trail again today, I'm confident that I would flounder in that setting for a while.

Imagine if, instead, the candidate worked out a project -- maybe at home, or maybe in an interview room for some time -- then you take time to review and understand their work and then go through this back-and-forth process of discussing their work. This would also benefit the candidate's understanding of how you collaborate to problem solve in your work environment.

The problem with this approach is that it requires the interviewer to actually invest time to understand the candidate's work.

Anyway, I hope you see why many see it as a problem that the process for a candidate to succeed at a job interview is to practice interviewing skills rather than demonstrating their engineer skills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Comment: I think whiteboards get unnecessary flak when the real culprits are games and riddles. I would argue that using a whiteboard to convey ideas is a fundamental skill if one has to work in a creative team.

Question: How do you validate that the posted company or job position doesn't need whiteboard? Is it after the fact, as in a disgruntled candidate complaining? I couldn't find any information about this on the site.

<comment><USER25> > I would argue that using a whiteboard to convey ideas is a fundamental skill > if one has to work in a creative team.

Yet a lot of people are never really taught to do it. Perhaps they pick up this fundamental skill just fine after a couple whiteboarding sessions in the company.

If a company is rejecting candidates for not having a skill that is really easy and quick to obtain, they'd better not be one of these companies that keep complaining about shortage of talent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> FYI All your subscriber's emails are accessible at [https://whiteboardfree.com/email_subscribers.json](https://whiteboardfree.com/email_subscribers.json) since you didn't put any authentication on those endpoints. It's a basic Rails app so I'm guessing other users may got a hold of the list already.

<comment><USER27> I guess their Privacy Policy checks out [https://whiteboardfree.com/privacy](https://whiteboardfree.com/privacy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I never realized whiteboarding was an issue. I wish someone would would make one of these sites for open office free jobs.(not the softare)

<comment><USER29> StackOverflow's job board has the "Joel Test" part where employers posting jobs can check off the points from [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel- test-12-s...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel- test-12-steps-to-better-code/) that they fulfill. One of them is "quiet working conditions", which comes close. Before looking it up just now, I could have sworn the point was something like "every developer has a door they can close", but oh well.

Anyway, I hoped you could search only for jobs where this box was checked by the company, but apparently not...

EDIT: It does allow searching for minimal salary and remote jobs, among the wishes listed in a sibling comment.

<comment><USER30> > Before looking it up just now, I could have sworn the point was something > like "every developer has a door they can close", but oh well.

EDIT: Ok, my mistake, my memory is failing me. "Doors that close" is used in a whole bunch of Joel blog posts, and "walls and doors" is used in the original Joel Test description.

But WaybackMachine seems to confirm that the official label from the "Joel Test" has always been "quiet working conditions" and does not appear to have been changed.

<comment><USER29> Sounds plausible, but the blog post from 2000 also has it as "Do programmers have quiet working conditions?"

So unless Joel went back and rewrote the past, it might be our memories. I am fairly sure that he did have another blog post that stated explicitly that every developer at FogCreek had a door.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Wow, there are so many new ways that people are coming up with to recruit software developers. Clearly there is a problem here that needs to be solved.

I understand that the company needs a way to vet people to make sure they are technically proficient for the job. However, there must be a better way of filtering people. I just bailed on a company after they told me what the interview process would be:

\- Take home coding quiz where you need to sign up and use their algorithm platform. As you would expect, there was asynchronous programming and a recursion algorithm involved (two for one!)

\- 3 more technical interviews. 2 of which were screen share and/or white boarding sessions. 1 is a "riddle part", which I assume is some kind of brain teaser involving a recursive algorithm.

After I saw the coding quiz and all the follow on stuff I just told them I wasn't interested. I was kind of offended, and it didn't put me in a positive mindset towards the company and engineers that worked there.

<comment><USER32> It all amounts to little more than our industries hazing rituals.

<comment><USER33> This is what I tell people all the time. That one word sums up nearly every dysfunctional interviewing and filtering process.

Hazing.

It's just monkeys making sure they only hire other similar-looking and similarly-acting monkeys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I still whiteboard my programming question when giving interviews, can someone summarize the case against whiteboards?

I'm just looking for the candidate's thought process and some pseudocode. I could do the same thing in an empty text file but the substance of the interview wouldn't change.

My feeling right now is that being anti whiteboard is focusing on trivialities like complaining that the office style guide uses Allman vs K&R bracketing or something. But I'm open to having my mind changed if there's something more to it.

<comment><USER35> Being anti-whiteboard is a proxy for being against the "regurgitate this CS trivia on a board in front of me" style of interview, not against the use of a whiteboard.

Most problems in practice that require non-trivial application of algorithms, dynamic programming and the like have two characteristics that make them differ considerably from whiteboard style quizzes. For one, they're going to be much less contrived (pick a random leetcode question for an example of this, odds are it's contrived). Secondly, they're going to be resolved when developers talk to each other about them and there is recognition of the solution, which most of the time is an application of algorithms and data structures with library implementations.

The ability to whiteboard things like "given an array of integers and a target find the indices of the pair of integers in the array that sum to the target" and "find the first missing positive integer in an unsorted array in O(n) time and O(1) space" provides almost no useful information about a candidate's ability to solve an actual problem the company faces in most instances. There are exceptions, but interviewing everyone for the standard of that one exception is asinine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Whiteboarding is fine when done well, horrible when done poorly. The variance is on the side of the interviewers.

I've done a lot of interviews over the years, and I've encountered a couple stereotypes:

1\. The gotcha interviewers. He pulled out his old algorithm text book and found the hardest problem.

2\. The no bullshit interviewer. Asks you to code a somewhat challenging, but solvable problem. No tricks. Basically non-trival fizz buzz problems. The problem with these is there are only so many practical problems you can give before it gets put up on leetcode, and every interviewee has memorized the code.

3\. The clueless interviewer. They try to give you a weird mix of an IQ test and a personality test, and maybe throw in a little bit of API trivia while they are at it.

</comment><comment><USER37> Is whiteboard interviewing so bad that people would go out of their way to avoid it? I mean, I've encountered / can imagine horror stories for all the usual alternatives: a) take this 3-day long mini-project, do it using all of our preferred technologies (some of which you'll be using for the first time) and get it back to us - it should only take you 4 hours! Or b) do this on site, using our machines and environments which will be unfamiliar to you. Or c) speak to some random invigilator over Skype. Or d) do a written test, or e) take us through your GitHub collection, which may or may not exist, etc.

My preferred way of testing people was usually to try to get them to show me that they have thought about why they develop software in the fashion that they do. I would prefer to do this in person, at a very high level, but it often ended up being a written test (where necessary, the language was your choice, or pseudocode). Is this wrong?

<comment><USER38> > Is whiteboard interviewing so bad that people would go out of their way to > avoid it? I mean, I've encountered / can imagine horror stories for all the > usual alternatives: a) take this 3-day long mini-project, do it using all of > our preferred technologies (some of which you'll be using for the first > time) and get it back to us - it should only take you 4 hours! Or b) do this > on site, using our machines and environments which will be unfamiliar to > you. Or c) speak to some random invigilator over Skype. Or d) do a written > test, or e) take us through your GitHub collection, which may or may not > exist, etc.

This is the problem. There was recently a large HN thread about the take-home projects and how so many people didn't like them.

None of the options are popular: if you use whiteboarding, people will complain it's a bunch of brain teasers unrelated to real programming work. If you use take-home projects, people will complain about doing unpaid work.

Would professional certifications help? I doubt it -- they would need to be based on standardized tests, which would have the same drawbacks as the whiteboarding questions nobody likes.

<comment><USER37> To give an alternative approach - I found that in general, I could get a pretty good idea about a candidate using either the verbal interaction or written test.

The idea was to give questions which are almost a polar opposite of the strange trivia style questions you see in certification exams. Instead of the candidate having to remember which overload of an API returns a byte[], we'd instead talk about things like how they prefer to structure a project, and how this feeds into maintainability, etc. If the person was into object orientation, we'd talk about that, if they were into a more functional style, same angle, but I want them to have thought about it from a software engineering side. It sounds wishy-washy, but with just a few pointed questions, you can detect both BS answers, as well as someone who hasn't really thought about it. I tend to find that this quality in an individual is a very important predictor of performance, as it indicates deep care and interest about their craft. With good candidates, you can get really deep into a discussion and know within 5 minutes that they are quality.

Along the way, you'd also get a pretty good picture of the persons strengths and stylistic preferences, which you can use to determine how and where they would fit in with the team(s) you had in mind.

The only downsides are that I wasn't always available for these interviews, and the written equivalent intimidating and could take long. Also, various people swore that they either can't perform well in written or verbal conditions, so perhaps letting the candidate choose between the two might be beneficial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I recently had an onsite tech screen at a FANG company that requires whiteboard programming. The problem itself wasn't hard but I missed a requirement that was actually a hint. I shutdown and couldn't move on or work through it.

That said, I don't think whiteboard programming is always bad but it is a skill that I don't exercise and it showed.

My advice, talk through the problem with the interviewer and don't start writing code on the whiteboard until the interviewer has ok'd your proposed solution.

<comment><USER40> I usually need like good 5-10 minutes of quite time to think about the problem in peace. I just can't seem to do with interviewer staring at me and hounding me to 'think out loud', sorry I can't talk and think at the same time. I have no practise at 'thinking out loud' , i never do it in real life.

<comment><USER41> And that's why you have to practice.

I was the same but I do a lot better now after having done some 200+ technical interviews and a lot of practice on my own.

<comment><USER42> 200 technical interviews?! What the hell? You shouldn't have to do 200 in your lifetime. This kinda reminds me of those MCSE certification bootcamps they used to have. They didn't teach you anything useful, they just taught you how to hack the test.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> At plated we do two coding interviews. The first is concrete, we have a library that is poorly written and their job is to implement a new feature and refactor it. This is a great interview to understand core skills. The second interview is a modeling exercise where we build an app from scratch with escalating amount of complexity but only asking for what the database and api endpoints would look like.

<comment><USER44> This seems pretty reasonable to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> My personal experience in hiring is that people should be able to explain concepts in a clear why. So usually I ask to explain an pattern that they say they have experience in. I let him/her choose how they want to explain it whiteboard / pen and paper / words only, sitting or standing. I don't care as long as the person is good in explaining and has a firm grasp of the subject. Both are needed to do a proper job. There are lots of people that are unable to explain MVC in a clear let alone correctly even if they used .NET MVC or spring MVC (or whatever)for 10+ years. After that is seldom useful to ask anything else.. this approach had never failed me.

</comment><comment><USER46> Do people hate whiteboarding in general or the questions they're being asked to draw?

I can fully understand dislike for puzzles and being asked to implement irrelevant algorithms in pseudo code. The interview should reflect the job being interviewed for.

I've found whiteboarding to be mutually helpful in questions about system architecture. Plus, it's something that we actually do on-the-job.

<comment><USER42> Yes, but you don't write what you expect to be fully functional code on a whiteboard. A whiteboard is good for sharing ideas. Using it to write and assess code is pretty stupid if you step back and think about it.

I mean ask yourself this: do you ever use the whiteboard to write code to the extent you expect some poor kid trying to get his first job to do? Hell no, you screen share an IDE or paste code in an email.

People used to have to write code on paper (I did this a few times in college ages ago) and that comes from the cost of compiling stuff way back when. Computing time is friggin cheap, that's why no one does it. To expect some new guy to be adept at that ancient practice is silly.

<comment><USER46> I agree. This is a form of the psychological concept of encoding specificity principle[1] which states that recall is most effective when the conditions at the time of encoding match the conditions at the time of retrieval.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encoding_specificity_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encoding_specificity_principle)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This all remains me of a quote I have recently seen: "Most Programmer wouldn't hire themselves"

As long as we keep asking people to do things that aren't like the work that we do, we will continue to get mismatches and people that interview well but work poorly. I don't have a great solution, finding good people is hard.

</comment><comment><USER48> Don't whiteboard during interviews? Or don't whiteboard at all? Dropping the former is good, the latter is bad...

</comment><comment><USER49> What would be a good selection strategy without technical interviews? I've seen people with good CV and reference projects being hired, only to turn out they literally couldn't program. It's old news that sneaking to a CS degree without learning anything substantial is possible, and those are easily debunked in even simple task like solving FizzBuzz on the whiteboard.

<comment><USER50> No whiteboard doesn't mean no technical interview. You can pair up on a real computer, you can have a take home, things like that.

<comment><USER49> Both of these have huge disadvantages for interviewing:

\- When working in front of a computer, people get worse at communicating. Even if they try to speak out their thougts, it usually doesn't work well, as thinking _and_ operating an IDE (or whatever at hand) already occupies a lot of brain capacity.

\- Take-home exercises are hard to control: You don't know how long a candidate worked on it. Even if there's a target like 4 hours, some might work all night on it - either because they couldn't do it in the allocated time, or because they fear some disadvantage. Apart of that, they might pay someone to solve it for them.

<comment><USER11> > Apart of that, they might pay someone to solve it for them.

I think that can be solved by having the candidate talk about their solution and how they made certain choices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> What about CS-riddles/competitive programming free companies? Who only ask _relevant_ to the job questions during interviews.

</comment><comment><USER52> I've been programming since BASIC on a VIC-20 sometime around age 6. I can code in like 10 languages and have written everything from crypto and network protocols to distributed systems, database sync engines, and high throughput video compression/decompression codecs.

I always fail whiteboard interviews. I can't code at all on a whiteboard.

<comment><USER33> You're the false negative that nearly every software company seems intent on avoiding at all costs...

...and probably a better software developer than 99% of the people they end up hiring.

<comment><USER52> I ended up starting my own so meh.

[https://zerotier.com/](https://zerotier.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Aside: With about 40 job postings, each at 300$/month, they're probably making $144k with little to no operational or infrastructure costs. They should be on [https://www.indiehackers.com/products](https://www.indiehackers.com/products).

</comment><comment><USER54> If you're interested in someones coding prowess and process, review something they have written with them. It's far more effective than commanding some nervous candidate to get in front of a group of people and start writing code on a wall.

</comment><comment><USER55> There is a Netflix and Lyft post, but going by past experiences there are whiteboard coding problems. Are these companies spamming it? How do they police these possibly fake posts? After all, the thing recruiters care most is how many people apply.

</comment><comment><USER56> ...do people really hate whiteboard interviews enough for a website like this to make money?

<comment><USER57> Some proportion of perfectly good engineers couldn't pass a whiteboard interview to save their lives, for much the same reason I couldn't pass a job interview that measured communication skills by karaoke performance and emoji literacy.

<comment><USER56> The company needs to evaluate your problem-solving skills though. I mean, I'll admit that writing code on a literal whiteboard is more physically arduous than on a keyboard or even a piece of paper, but if the root issue is live coding challenges themselves, I don't see a way around it.

Some companies look at your GitHub profile instead, which imo is much more unfair, because it presumes you've had the free time and the desire to work on side projects, which shouldn't be a requirement for a job.

Maybe companies should adopt an either-or policy? Give the interviewer the option to demonstrate their skills in the form that works best for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Maybe Lyft varies it's interviews, but:

1) [https://whiteboardfree.com/job_posts/52](https://whiteboardfree.com/job_posts/52) \- Lyft - Data Engineering

2) [https://eng.lyft.com/interviewing-tips-for-android- engineers...](https://eng.lyft.com/interviewing-tips-for-android- engineers-f01ce7fba163) \- "Expect a few coding questions either on a whiteboard " ( Dec 21, 2017 )

Pretty sure Netflix (also has a job listed) does whiteboard based evaluation too.

</comment><comment><USER59> Up next: elevator music free jobs. Dev jobs at Companies without that predictable elevator music.

Maybe I'm missing the point though.

<comment><USER60> The point is "post a job for $xxx". This shit has gotten popular after the success of weworkremotely

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I don't mind whiteboarding. I do mind questions that are puzzles or algorithmic in a way that does not directly reflect the company's current software.

I usually (ok, almost always) flesh out designs and pseudocode with pencil and paper anyway, so changing to use a whiteboard isn't an issue.

Standing in front of a handful of strangers glaring at me while I try and figure out some stupid algorithm they had to Google themselves is hazing and should be stopped.

Edit: Also, dinging me for small syntax issues on a whiteboard when I'm used to using an IDE is not really cool.

</comment><comment><USER61> You know, when I'm interviewing someone my VASTLY preferred approach is to have them walk me through something they've coded that they're proud of. That's not aways possible, but often it is. Give me a good slow walk through your github repo and tell me where and why you made the choices you did, what the tradeoffs were, etc. . . Better than making some poor bastard jump through hoops on problems that only vaguely resemble the ones they'll be solving at work.

<comment><USER62> Yes this is the best method I have found. Let them explain something they have worked on that provides them with experience they believe qualifies them for the position. Here I can surely expect them to have depth, assess their communication skills, be able to explain further on questions from me etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I'd love to hear alternatives, rather than a list of who doesn't.

I don't use whiteboards for coding tests, I use whiteboards as one (of several) ways to evaluate how someone thinks on their feet without having Stack Overflow & Google at their fingertips. I don't only want to know if someone can code, I want to know about their process, how they think about things, what assumptions they start with, and what kinds of things they like to explore. I want to see some personality. Take home problems don't measure that very well, nor do coding tests with online resources available.

I've never met a perfect interview, but what are some suggestions for more acceptable and/or better ways to evaluate how someone thinks on their feet?

I remember hearing that Google's done quite a bit of research on hiring practices vs outcomes, and that one of the leading predictors is having external groups do the interviewing, i.e., making sure the people doing the interviewing have no stake in the outcome.

<comment><USER64> My hypothesis (of what people want in an interview):

Interviewer to engage in conversation with applicant about applicant's prior work in detail. If the applicant can give sufficient explanations of systems/projects and the interviewer can ask appropriate probing questions and get sufficient responses to those questions from the applicant.. then the interview can be concluded positively.

The crux of it, from the applicant point of view, is that they want to be believed and treated "professionally". Further it's "insulting" to be questioned about anything other than specific experiences. That's why you see objections to every sort of "objective" line of interview:

sample projects - too much time, why am I coding for you for free?

github/open source - I have hobbies outside of programming

white boarding/google doc coding - not my environment for writing code. I need emacs with xyz keybindings or we're not going to make progress.

algorithm problems solving - the job doesn't entail re-implementing hash tables, or sorting algorithms... The question(s) are not germane to the position

etc etc etc

<comment><USER63> > they want to be believed and treated "professionally". Further it's > "insulting" to be questioned about anything other than specific experiences.

Yeah, I agree; I have the same hypothesis that this is what people want. And it's a problem to assume and/or act like talking about anything other than specific coding experience is in any way insulting. That's not exactly a realistic expectation, nor is it a great attitude for getting hired.

Personality, behavior, poise, attitude and communication skills are _absolutely_ relevant to someone's ability to do their job on a team. If you can't think on your feet or answer a question without a computer in front of you, and you start getting angry, how will you behave in meetings? That behavior is precisely one of things I look for when I ask candidates to think on their feet.

If someone assumes that being asked certain questions is "unprofessional", then that's a red flag and I'll be more careful before hiring someone like that. Now that I think about it, there's a bit of irony that if someone performs poorly on these kinds of questions, I'm likely to spend more time investigating that and asking more questions along those lines.

<comment><USER42> Ask your doctor to do a free diagnosis so you know he's for real. See where he instructs you to go.

<comment><USER63> Did you mean to reply to someone else? I appreciate the reply, but I'm confused about what you're responding to and what point you're trying to make. I haven't suggested or advocated anything about doing work for free.

That said, this example doesn't convince me of much. Doctors have to go though a full year (or more) of underpaid work (called residency), and worse, extremely long and on-call hours. They think programmers are pretty spoiled, at least the ones I know personally do. When I've complained to them about pulling 80 hour weeks in films & games (sometimes without overtime pay), I've gotten words back like "lazy" and "whiny". :P

Doctors also have to do unpaid diagnoses when they interview for jobs, in order to prove they're real. And they have to do unpaid diagnoses for their family and friends, just like we have to do IT for family & friends.

If you want the job, you do need to demonstrate you're capable of performing the job, no? What alternative are you suggesting?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I had to write a JavaScript program on graph paper (with no computer on hand) as a college test. Then the professor would type them out afterwards with you and try to run it. Whenever I hear about this whiteboarding issue I think of that. It was actually kind of fun in a weird way though. I drew nice curly braces.

<comment><USER66> > I drew nice curly braces.

Heh, I code pretty often on paper when I'm working through a design and my style has evolved to just using < and > as proxies for curly braces which saves me time, since trying to draw a nice curly brace takes me so long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I do not mind whiteboarding at all. I have three whiteboards at home for brainstorming. I draw the line at doing take home tests.

I cannot interview a company if I am doing a take home assignment. With whiteboarding, I get to also assess my potential co-workers abilities by seeing if they are asking interesting questions.

</comment><comment><USER68> This is great. I suspect the "coding exercises" in interviews are really dominance hierarchy games. It goes against politeness theory and is a threat to an individual's 'negative face' or need for autonomy.

</comment><comment><USER69> Some companies effectivdely use whiteboarding, others don't.

This is a true snapshot of the absurd sense of entitlement among some tech workers these days. When the bubble eventually pops, people will look back at this website promotion with awe.

It's like challenging the generally accepted standard that interviewees dress up a bit more formally than a typical day at the office (i.e. button down versus old T-shirt).

</comment><comment><USER70> I interviewed once at a place where a friend worked as an engineer. She assured me that they didn't do whiteboard questions. Guess what I had to contend with during two different interviews...

</comment><comment><USER71> At my work one part of the interview is a System Design test, where the candidate is presented with a problem and we ask them to come up with a system (i.e. by gathering requirements etc)

Usually this means drawing stuff on the whiteboard with boxes and arrows. Not looking for the perfect system or 'correct' solution, just really having a look at what the candidate is experienced in and how they think.

Whiteboards are fine for that use case, and can be very expressive.

Doing binary search trees and stuff though doesn't seem as useful really.

</comment><comment><USER72> This is a good idea, although the focus on 'anti-whiteboard' is a bit limiting. It's a shame it's its own site instead of a feature on other sites.

There's no interview process that works best for every candidate; some prefer whiteboards or homework or practical debugging on their on computer or hand- wavey design or whatever. Candidates (and companies!) could save a lot of time by letting applicants filter their searches to companies using methods that will let them put their best foot forward.

</comment><comment><USER73> I'd much rather code on a whiteboard than do a take-home assignment. I may be in the minority but I rather suspect I'm not the only one.

I can understand that some people find whiteboard coding really stressful. I never have, and I have found take-home assignments to be a huge time-sink which typically results in minimal feedback (and sometimes none at all).

Maybe the right thing to do is to just give interviewees a choice.

</comment><comment><USER74> Using a whiteboard to give a talk about your project is desirable in my opinion , you might need to be more specific with what is whiteboard free.

</comment><comment><USER75> So is this supposed to be a good or a bad thing? I've used whiteboards in a lot of interviews to great effect. I wouldn't confuse whiteboards with riddles. I also hate riddles and puzzles because they check for the riddle- solving skill, not the actual skill which will be used at work. Whiteboards are a completely orthogonal topic to riddles.

</comment><comment><USER76> I was "surprise whiteboarded" recently. It was my first whiteboard interview and I actually thought it was an interesting experience.

</comment><comment><USER77> I really like the idea of this, but how many jobs posted here are for senior or high experience positions? The whiteboard filter can still happen at any of these companies in junior developer ranks.

This just creates elitism where the "senior" developers get nice hiring processes, and the junior developers get stuck with traditional torture.

<comment><USER78> I think its still valid if someone doesn't have a good-size body of work, however the more CS heavy it is and unrelated to the actual work the more you're optimizing for "did this person recently graduate with a CS degree".

</comment></comment><comment> d--b So all of these ask for a 2-week home project?

</comment><comment><USER79> How about "night-mode.com": developer jobs at old-school companies that interview with a blackboard and chalk.

</comment><comment><USER80> What i want the most is being able to put these companies to test, i have 0 problems with whiteboard problems but like evaluating them, are they all compotent or is it the company a one trick pony with only a few decent engineers.

</comment><comment><USER81> It would be very useful to be able to filter just the remote positions. Searching for "remote" as a location returns no results, and I can see in the list that some remote positions are being offered.

</comment><comment><USER82> Free alternative: [https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without- whiteboards](https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards)

</comment><comment><USER83> A lot of the important tech decision take place around a whiteboard where people communicate their ideas.

Whiteboard questions are okay. Only giving tasks is not how a real workplace work

</comment><comment><USER84> Cool. A website full of companies to avoid. Thanks for posting!

</comment><comment><USER85> The Terms of Service page is blank ([https://whiteboardfree.com/terms](https://whiteboardfree.com/terms))

</comment><comment><USER86> I think whiteboards are much better than the remote code-as-we-watch stuff, which is even more common and not a good way to measure actual work skills.

</comment><comment><USER87> Am I the only one who thought this post title meant jobs at companies that simply don't use whiteboards in the day-to-day aspect of working?

</comment><comment><USER88> Lyft doesn't do whiteboard when hiring engineers?

<comment><USER89> That's the first thing I noticed about the list. I interviewed with Lyft last year and they did whiteboard style interviews. Since when did this change?

<comment><USER60> It didnt. I'd guess they are just pulling in a ton of jobs so they look popular enough to justify the fee to post a job there

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> I've been coding for 25 years and I wrote some complicated piece of software, but I would be incapable to write code on a whiteboard.

</comment><comment><USER91> Best job board marketing I've seen in a while.

</comment><comment><USER92> Call me racist, but I also don't like blackboards.

</comment><comment><USER20> Whiteboard problems work great as a general intelligence test if administered correctly. A well designed whiteboard problem will filter out people of lesser intelligence. This means the people you would be working with would generally be more intelligent. This is not a bad thing.

Furthermore, whiteboards are great communication tools. I spend some time on VRChat's whiteboard room teaching people various algorithms, and other abstract things to help me learn. Someone who knows how to use a whiteboard and communicate correctly would be a better hire than someone who doesn't.

If the company you work at uses whiteboard problems to vet interviewees, just drill them. With a little practice, you'll have a better chance.

<comment><USER93> This is so wrong that it actually hurts my brain. Albert Einstein, a certifiable genius probably could not tell you how to invert a binary tree, this has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with how many HackerRank problems you have memorized.

<comment><USER94> True, but there are also brain-teaser type problems that don't require memorization of obscure algorithms, and those could actually be disguised intelligence tests. (But I suppose if you really wanted to you could memorize most of the brain-teaser problems in existence.)

<comment><USER93> Google has already shown that those types of questions have 0 correlation to developer success.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


If Sir Tim Berners-Lee had his time again he'd probably leave // out. - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8306515.stm

<comment><AUTHOR> He has also said he'd leave out the colon.

I thought the whole point was to distinguish the protocol from the path. I can't believe the BBC article completely misses that forward slashes are used for paths in Unix (and acceptable in most other OSes instead of back slashes).

See: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_%28computing%29>

</comment><comment><USER2> See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881278>

<http://searchyc.com/berners?sort=by_date>

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah thanks :-)</comment></comment>


Google is sending out blankets to open-source developers - <AUTHOR> http://slashdot.org/submission/2640723/google-is-sending-out-blankets-sic-to-open-source-developers <comment><USER2> I got an email like this a couple of years ago -- apparently someone liked my work on bsdiff. 175 USD of stuff from the Google Store plus a gift; in my case, the gift turned out to be a modular pocket knife (<http://www.quirky.com/products/35>). (Oh, and it had "Google <3s your work" printed on it -- so it wasn't just a left-over.)

I think it's great that Google has a program for recognizing open source developers; that said, they seem to be going a bit far afield with their "give people something cool they might not have yet". I think they'd do better to send people Android phones -- at least that is something people would be more likely to use.

<comment><USER3> To be fair: Not everyone lives in silicon valley. Some of us have winters to contend with. I have blankets everywhere, because I'm not about to pay the required energy bill to keep my house balmy.

<comment><USER4> I suspect that nearly everybody already has a blanket or two unless they live in Borneo or the like. It's a little like Google giving out food. A blanket is a basic necessity and aside from destitute street bums, people generally already have enough. I'm wondering if Google is subtly suggesting that open source devs can't pay their own bills?

Then again, it's also a little like Google giving out t-shirts. Maybe they're assuming that everybody could have one more?

<comment><USER3> Well, when you have blankets sitting out on couches and the like all the time, at some point they become part of the decore. So even tho I have many blankets, I really would be OK with another. Additionally the ones that get used get worn out, dirty, or even boring (like tshirts) so a rotation is nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some people seem to dislike the blankets.

Google (or anyone, I guess) could set up a donation system so these blankets end up somewhere useful, rather than just sitting in a cupboard.

I don't know why people don't like blankets. I freakin' love blankets.

<comment><USER6> No sleeves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's wrong with getting a blanket from Google? (along with $175, actually) We always keep one in our living room, handy for occasional dozing on the couch. You can give one to a homeless guy and he will be thankful for it. After the earthquake in 1999 here in my hometown in Turkey, we received thousands of them from all around the world (got one from Greece and was thankful for it). Cats love them, you can use one for the floor to make a winter home for street cats... etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> How could Google e so callous as to reward people for their contributions. I realize polyester is a fabric of the devil, but I don't think a google is trying to convert anybody to the church of satan.

Is it so hard to say "thanks" for an unexpected gift?

(And to the mods, please remove the [sic]. Yes, it's in the original, but it's wrong and will certainly lead to clicks from people trying to figure out what was really written.)

<comment><USER9> > and will certainly lead to clicks from people trying to figure out what was > really written.

 _raises hand, looks sheepish_ I couldn't figure out what word was close to "blankets".

<comment><USER10> Me too. blanket... blanks... blankety...? banker.. grah.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why is there a "[sic]" in the title? After reading the post on Slashdot, I have the impression that we are talking about actual blankets. So the word is correctly spelled.

<comment><USER2> [sic] isn't used exclusively for spelling mistakes -- it means "thus was it written", aka. "this looks wrong, but it really isn't".

In this case, I think the intention is to make explicit that yes, they really are sending _blankets_.

<comment><USER12> Regardless, it's an unnecessary qualifier. Most readers here can take the leap of faith that yes, the title was written correctly, as they wait about 2 seconds for the link to load. Who cares, it's just a title, but all things being equal it should be removed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've gotten this reward from Google devs twice now. First time it was tricky to find some things on the Google store: But I managed to get myself a nice medium-weight Google jacket and a Google cutting board (!). The second time was even trickier, I already had everything I wanted. I ended up getting my girlfriend a Google jacket as well - thankfully she liked it! Amusingly we get asked _all the time_ if we work at Google, because of the jackets, which is not true. I considered lying to the strangers that asked but reconsidered and went with "I have a friend that works there and he got me the jacket." I've even had one lady on the subway start asking me questions about the Google search engine, unprompted. Tech-branded outerwear definitely results in some weird conversations.

I should mention, weird Google loot not withstanding, that I think this program is awesome. Giving Google devs an outlet for giving something back to the Open Source devs that they like is really appreciated. Obviously financial contributions are even better but that can be logistically tricky and this seems like an easy middle-ground.

<comment><USER14> It's worth recognizing that the Google Open Source Programs office absolutely makes financial contributions to open source projects as well!

(I've been a recipient of both the individual award, and projects I've worked on have been recipients of grants from the OSPO).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> My take on it is that Google is trying to advertise a well-paid fulltime position in their offices: "So you're an Open Source Dev? Surely you must be poor, thus: homeless, thus: here, have a blanket."

</comment><comment><USER16> According to this post on Slashdot, the open-source developer got "$175 to spend on the Google store" and a blanket, not just a blanket.

</comment><comment><USER17> In an office at the HR department at Google.

The director: _Someone tell me what we are going to do with the 3 thousand extra blankets we acquired for our 2012 employee bonus program?_

The smart guy: _Why not give them to those developers who write open source software and give them for free? Those poor people must need blankets!_

People start to stand up and clap, slowly and firm.

<comment><USER18> They might be older than that. I used to participate in Google Answers (remember that?) circa 2002-2003 or so and even got certified to answer questions for cash. I got a polyester blanket embroidered with the Google logo as a christmas present for no reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So what's wrong with giving out blankets? I don't quite get it. It's an odd gift, but I don't see how it can be worth a polemic.

<comment><USER20> They are disease-infected, I presume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "I say, 'You should blanket me' or 'you should blanket her', meaning like a blanket is a blessing. It's a way of showing love and caring." --Michael Jackson

</comment><comment><USER22> Why can't this be a genuine desire from Google to send a feeling of warmth to open source developers?

</comment><comment><USER23> I was honestly expecting an extended Jeffrey Amherst/smallpox infected blankets metaphor here.

</comment><comment><USER24> I was baffled by the title, after some consideration I decided it was probably a metaphor relating to the diseased blankets given to native indians and that google was offering to help open source efforts while covertly killing them.

After reading and discovering that it was literally just blankets I am as baffled as before.

<comment><USER25> Doesn't seem like a very "Google" thing to do, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Blankets? Makes me think of a certain incident where blankets that were possibly contaminated with smallpox were given to Native Americans during the siege of Fort Pitt. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontiac%27s_Rebellion#Siege_of_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontiac%27s_Rebellion#Siege_of_Fort_Pitt)

Not insinuating that Google is trying to kill you, it was just the first thing I thought of.

</comment><comment><USER27> Gifting blankets... This sounds familiar. So it has begun. The war against open source. Blankets laden with smallpox.

</comment><comment><USER28> Your work probably made someone sleep better, so now they want to offer you the same in return.

</comment><comment><USER29> Is this a legal technique to avoid Google having to pay for open source software in any way? Does acceptance of the blanket mean anything legally?

<comment><USER30> It's a bribe !!! ;) seriously , no string attached whatsoever , it is a gift and that's great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> My first impression was that this was some joke and that Google think open source developers are poor and need help keeping warm at night.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think the blankets mean that Google wants you to feel warm & fuzzy about what you're doing.

</comment><comment><USER33> Why is there nobody explaining the reason to send some nearly random people blankets?

<comment><USER34> Not random. To open-source developers. The Google <3 open-source. To say thanks. A blanket is a gift. A gift says thank you. So does $175. Got it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> #firstworldproblems

</comment><comment><USER36> Looks like an open and shut case of Google being hilariously evil again. What's going to happen when they run out of blankets, huh? Are they are going to shut that down like Reader? I just don't know who to trust anymore.

</comment><comment><USER37> Don't open the ones from Oracle, they have smallpox.

<comment><USER38> Oracle don't send gifts. Only lawyers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Not cool. I heard about this program of awarding bonuses to devs. Turns out is was actually just marketing schwag store credit? Evil.</comment>


Ask HN: Finding tech team - <AUTHOR>

Hello and Happy New year!
I am an entrepreneur with no deep knowledge in tech. However, I have a good idea and most importantly startup capital. I am based between DC and NY and would love to meet developers who would like to help me build a new type of social networking platform for niche market. The site would have payment systems and other interesting features.
My real problem is finding the team with tech skills and choosing the right ones. I am willing to hire full-time employees. Please advice me on tackling this milestone. If you would like to join, please let me know - jokhta[at]gmail[dot]com.
Thank you <comment><USER2> What about setting up a small recruiting site with a set of programming challenges? It has worked for me in the past.

But I guess you first need to find someone to help you out with that. You may try something like <http://www.scriptlance.com/> to get this mini-site done.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you for your advice, i will look in to it

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "...However, I have a good idea and most importantly startup capital."

<comment><AUTHOR> thats really helpful thank you</comment></comment>


Adobe experiment slips new words into your voice recordings - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2016/11/06/adobe-experiment-adds-words-to-recordings/ <comment><USER2> I don't see how the watermarking they talk about is going to succeed in preventing forgeries.

If they're planning to watermark unedited recordings, you have a huge false positive problem because there are billions of hours of legitimate but unwatermarked audio recordings, and will probably continue to be. You can also get false negatives by tampering with a watermark-capable device to get it to watermark something that wasn't recorded from analog. Or you can rerecord edited audio from an analog source and simply claim that your "genuine" recording is slightly noisy.

If they're planning to watermark edited recordings, someone else can implement the same kind of technology but without the watermarking.</comment>


Facebook has acquired Face.com - <AUTHOR> http://face.com/?

<comment><USER2> I wonder if this has anything to do with the domain names.

Any ideas?

<comment><AUTHOR> IMHO yes. Face.com's API could be developed by Facebook in a fews days</comment></comment>


I want to work on a web application (FREE/PAID) - <AUTHOR>

Looking to add some web-app examples to my portfolio/resume and would rather contribute to a project then make my own. I would be suited for a PHP project but have a great understanding of most internet technologies. If no one here needs any help, does anyone know of any sites where people post their repositories that I can contribute to. Thanks in advance, Thomas <comment><USER2> _"... would rather contribute to a project then make my own. I would be suited for a PHP project but have a great understanding of most internet technologies. ..."_

try github ~ [http://github.com/search?type=Everything&language=php...](http://github.com/search?type=Everything&language=php&q=webapp&repo=&langOverride=&x=12&y=22&start_value=1)

</comment><comment><USER3> I need help - looking for someone with the/some of the following skills.

1\. ajax/css - strong skills in UI and design 2\. Iphone app development

This would be purely client side programming/skill requirements.

email me your contact info: email@example.com: martin.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hi Thomas, I've got a project you might be interested in. Email me your contact info and we can chat. firstname.lastname@example.com -Kris

</comment><comment><USER5> I have couple of ideas that we could implement together and look at starting a venture. Would you be interested in joining me?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds great, email me firstname.lastname@example.com</comment></comment>


Bitcoin plummets 32% in two days, threatens mainstream adoption - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-14/bitcoin-s-2-day-plunge-threatens-mainstream-adoption.html

<comment><USER2> I wonder if Bitcoin's recent adoption by some big sites is actually what is bringing the price down as people with stored up BTC are sending them to merchants, who are instantly converting them to their preferred currency?

<comment><USER3> THat's an interesting thought, - I vector toward thinking that there was a chokehold on new money coming into the system. It was really hard to acquire bitcoins by a wide base of people.

It got tons of press - but at the end of the day Joe Schmoe who has a desire for it has no idea how to purchase it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've always thought of it like this: Bitcoin:Cryptocurrency::Yahoo:InternetSearchEngines

Cryptocurrencies have a strong future, but I don't think Bitcoin has much of one. Yahoo had its early glory, but it declined as other search engines solved its problems.

<comment><USER5> Yahoo is doing just fine

<comment><USER4> As of early/mid-2014, their share of the search market hit its lowest ever of 10% of the market. My stats for my web properties paint an even worse picture.

As a company they're doing fine because the market size is growing and they're getting aggressive about paid search, not by being technically superior.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For anyone watching bitcoin technicals, has the volume been driving the volatility or has the volatility driven the volume? The volume spikes seemed to coincide directly with the price drop, so I am assuming this is someone just trying to divest themselves of a lot of bitcoin over the course of a few days.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't think cryptocurrencies long term value is in their USD amount. It's in their other features like being able to send money across the world with minimal transaction fees and certianity the transaction will not be interrupted.

<comment><USER5> If the value of bitcoin is so low that you can't buy enough of them to pay for your purchase without drastically changing the value of the currency then they're not particularly useful as a method of payment.

<comment><USER8> At the moment of this writing, there are 13725450 Bitcoins in existence [1], with a value of $195.30 each [2]. That makes a grand total of $2,680,580,385 (2.6 billion).

How low would they have to fall for there not being enough of them to perform a transaction?

[1] [https://blockexplorer.com/q/totalbc](https://blockexplorer.com/q/totalbc) [2] [https://www.coinbase.com/charts](https://www.coinbase.com/charts)

<comment><USER5> 2.7 billion market cap, not available to you. Say you needed to make a $10,000+ purchase. If you can't buy or sell that much bitcoin without considerably altering it's price it becomes a hassle of a currency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This means it's another time to buy in. I made a ton of money off the last debasement; I bet this one will be incredible.

I still consider the coins undervalued at $800/btc.

<comment><USER10> How can you put a value on an intangible good that is backed by nothing?

<comment><USER9> Godaddy.com must blow your mind.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps "intangible" was the wrong word. But domain names, unlike bitcoins, are actually useful for something. Bitcoins are just placeholders for value or wealth, like any other currency. The only reason they are useful is because we say a bitcoin is worth x dollars. We don't have to make an artificial distinction like that for a domain name because it is obvious what it is used for.

Even if domain names were free they would still have value, if bitcoins were free they would have 0 value.

<comment><USER11> Eh, I can trade a bitcoin for +/\- 200$ bucks, currently. That seems like a example of "good for something".

I can also transfer currency of any type, via the internet, without interacting with a financial institution(buy bitcoin using your preferred currency, trade bitcoin, the received converts bitcoin into their preferred currency), this capability also seems like it could be "good for something".

I feel like the "it's internet funny money!" claims are just as wrong as the "bitcoin will change everything about currency" claims.

<comment><USER12> That's not what the intrinsic value argument is about. The "good for something" (as intrinsic value was put here) is the question if something is still useful if its use as a placeholder for value collapses.

If the price of rice collapses, I can still eat it. If the price of cars collapses I can still drive mine to work. If the price of web domains collapses, people can still use it to visit my web page. If the price of Bitcoin collapses to zero, you can still do what with your coin?

<comment><USER11> US Dollars have no intrinsic value either, this does not stop anybody from using them.

Talking about rice is silly, we are talking about currency. No major economies currencies are based on anything with intrinsic value.

<comment><USER10> Technically they do because the paper and metal cost money. Other than that, they are actually backed by something.

<comment><USER11> Backed by what? Faith? Confidence? You can't trade your US dollar in for gold. The note literally just says, "You must accept this for any debt(Because)".

Are we really going to go down to that intrinsic value _of the paper it 's printed on_??? To be honest, I actually have little faith in bitcoin myself, but I can at least see the reason why it has taken off as far as it has, and it did earn me a pretty penny when I got out(I mined all my own bitcoins and just to experiment with a new technology, right from the beginning).

I just get tired of hearing extremophile arguments this way or that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>