Whiteboard Exercises

If you are interviewing for any kind of hands-on development position you may be asked to go up to the whiteboard and write some code or markup. I have seen many candidates who were remarkably polished and articulate during the verbal Q&A fail miserably when they went up to the board. As the saying goes, these candidates talked the talk but they couldn’t walk the walk.

Why did this happen? I suspect it’s because many people have only a superficial knowledge of the technologies they list on their resume. They know enough to talk about it competently in an interview, but not to apply it in practice, especially under pressure. Or they may call themselves ‘Architects’ and may not have written any code in the past year or two. Or perhaps having to perform in front of several strangers just puts them outside their comfort zone.

To prepare yourself for these exercises you should practice writing code and markup yourself on a whiteboard. You’ll find that it’s a bit different from writing code in a Visual Studio style IDE with IntelliSense helping you out. You’ll have to think on the fly, and you’ll have to remember the important keywords and syntax. Once you’ve got that routine down pat you’ll be ready for the in-person grilling.