Gant - Surviving the Whiteboard Interview: a Developers Guide to Using Soft Skills to Get Hired

You might be wondering why I am qualified to write this book. Youd be right to do so. Lots of stuff is available about getting through the development interview process, some by experienced developers and others that, frankly, dont have a wide range of experience to draw from.

I, on the other hand, do have a fair bit of experience in this space. November 2018 marked a milestone for me, because that month will be the 20th anniversary of the first time I got paid for writing code, as well as the anniversary of the first time I went through the process of a development interview. That was my freshman year of college and happened after four and a half years of learning to code on my own. I later followed that up with completing my bachelors at Lipscomb University, hitting the workforce and interviewing for full-time positions in late 2002. Since then, Ive had 17 software development jobs, many of which were short-term contracts, along with numerous side projects, most of which required one or more interviews and at least half of which required getting through a whiteboard interview.

Ive not only survived numerous software development interviews from the interviewee side of the table, but I have conducted interviews as both a manager and as a lead developer. Having led and managed developers, Ive learned a lot about what a manager is looking for when conducting an interview. Knowing this has given me a lot of insight into some best practices for developers who are trying to get hired.

While not a qualification for writing this guide, Id also like to point out here that I am one of the guys on the Complete Developer Podcast ( www.CompleteDeveloperPodcast.com ). As of the writing of this book, the podcast has been going for more than 3 years and has a lot of stuff that might appeal to you if you are reading this guide. In addition, I am also one of the founders of Developer Launchpad ( www.DeveloperLaunchpad.com ), which is a meetup group focused around helping developers get ready for developer interviews by giving them practice coding exercises and real training on dealing with whiteboard interviews, so that their first experience with it isnt in an interview where the stakes are higher. I also frequently speak on the topic and have presented a talk on this topic at numerous times.

I am sharing these tactics with you in this book for a lot of reasons. For one, whiteboard interviews are unnecessarily challenging and difficult, especially for new developers who dont know the tricks and tactics to get through it. I also personally detest whiteboard interviews, as I dont think they are a particularly good way to evaluate someones skill as a developer. I hope that this guide will not only help you get through this process in a way that makes it work well for you, but that the hacks that this book contains will circulate widely enough to eventually make it a less popular interviewing method.

Developer hiring is fundamentally broken as currently constructed, and if enough people can learn to use the broken system to their advantage, we just might rid ourselves of it. In that sense, this serves as a bit of graffiti on the wall that keeps qualified people out of development when they shouldnt be. You might say that this is a bit of a personal crusade and youd be right.

Many thanks to Erin Orstrom. A question of hers during a meetup group long ago started the chain of events that culminated in this book, and she did the technical review of the code in Chapter .