Wombat

I write code. Good code. There is a fair chance that I wrote the web browser you are using to read these words. This is what I do. Well last week I got persuaded by a recruiter to interview at another company, even though I am reasonably happily employed right now. However, the mating ritual of a tech company is a strange one. They pursue people, flatter them, say they can't live without them, then once they have them in the building they subject them to rigorous testing. In this case it meant that hordes of Phds interrogated me, one after the other, coming and going through the course of an entire day. And what did they want me to do? Write code. Now you'd think that the fact that I've written successful commercial applications might be some vague indication that I can write code, but no, they have to see me do it. On a white board.

Let's repeat that. A white board. A fucking whiteboard. They want me to do computer programming, but not on a computer. And also not written in private with time to think about things, get a cup of coffee, write a bit of code, think about it, write some more, change my mind and write it a bit differently, and then eventually after I've got it working beautifully and running like a rocket propelled cheetah, show it to someone else. No. They want me to write it line by line on the whiteboard, as Athena sprang fullly formed from the head of Zeus. While they watch (and often there are two or three of them). And they don't just watch, they heckle, and ask "Are you sure you mean to do it like that?" and "Isn't that the wrong way around?" and all the fucking annoying things that people would say if I let anybody look over my shoulder when I code, which I do not.

Programmers of the world unite. We should all say no to whiteboard coding. It's unnatural and the only time anybody is ever good at it is when they are cheating, like when people already know the answer or when they have memorized solutions to common programming problems for just this eventuality.

Luckily I didn't need the job this time, but it's made me think about the whiteboard interview. When I do decide to leave my current company I'm going to cheat like everybody else; do a web search for common programming questions, take an afternoon coding up perfect answers and I will practice writing those solutions on a whiteboard until I appear to be as competent as I actually am.