interview: whiteboard design session

[Michael Raymond Jr.]

what do you think this means?

i'm going to draw, or they are and i'll be asked questions? anyone run into this for entry level java jobs? is it more likely this will be UML, or code?

[arulk pillai]

I had a 2.5 hour white board interview with an insurance company where there were two technical staff and the hiring manager asked me technical/ reasoning (i.e How would you go about...) questions where I had to draw layered architecture diagrams (e.g. multi-tier architecture), class diagram, sequence diagram and code snippets. The interview was comprehensive and the very next morning they made me an offer. Take each interview as a learning/training session.

[Michael Raymond Jr.]

Originally posted by arulk pillai:
I had a 2.5 hour white board interview with an insurance company where there were two technical staff and the hiring manager asked me technical/ reasoning (i.e How would you go about...) questions where I had to draw layered architecture diagrams (e.g. multi-tier architecture), class diagram, sequence diagram and code snippets. The interview was comprehensive and the very next morning they made me an offer. Take each interview as a learning/training session.

thanks for the response. this is the first time i've applied/interviewed for a programming job, so it's all new to me. guess i'll need to review sequence diagrams and UML a bit. the white board session is 20-30 minutes i guess.

[Theodore Casser]

After an earlier post on this board, I actually did add in a whiteboard question to our interview process. I like the idea of a question that's unstructured and requires the candidate to do more than rattle off a technical answer that is purely right-wrong, or have to tell us what (s)he thinks we want to hear. (Though, admittedly, we do also make it clear that being precisely UML-compliant is not what we're requiring, but that the exercise is more so we can see how their mind works.)

I think being asked those types of questions is becoming an increasingly common experience.