Remote technical interviews: how to whiteboard without the actual whiteboard?

Question

Thinking back to some of my best interviews - both how I performed as a candidate, an interviewer, or the individuals involved on both sides - I always find the white-board process as a central piece of success.

That is to say - I find that candidates, myself included, perform a lot better in explaining their thoughts and navigating complex problems when they can illustrate their thinking. Additionally, many algorithm problems that require being solved in less than 30 minutes are made significantly more doable if a candidate considers drawing it out (such as Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock).

And doesn't this make sense? We often were told by mentors, or tell our juniors, "Try writing a problem out first. Even before psuedocoding - take a pen and paper and really map out your thinking."

With that said, I find that none of my colleagues, as interviewees or interviewers, are doing technical interviews with the actual white boarding process. Given our circumstances of remote life, that's obvious. I can't help but digress and wonder what kind of candidates are being left behind because they aren't given the white boarding opportunity many of us were afforded just two years ago.

So - how do we whiteboard without the actual whiteboard? How do we make sure to give all candidates a fair opportunity and not leave behind those who would be great hires had they been given the chance to draw out their solution?

Answer 1

Personally, I bought a really cheap camera on a stand which swivels and which allows me to capture my writing on my own little whiteboard (or on a piece of paper). A second option is to buy a cheap Wacom tablet knockoff that connects to your computer (in case the platform supports a shared whiteboard, or in case the platform allows the candidate to share their screen).

Eventually, I've even stopped using my camera. Following the lead of this developer, I've learned to draw most of my diagrams using ascii text. This takes some practice, but it's definitely possible.

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[7, 1, 5, 3, 6, 4] 

Best time to sell and buy stock

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[1, 2, 3]

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[3, 2, 1]

But in your case, since you're the interviewer, when you see that an interviewee is struggling, you could just tell the interviewee that he can take a few minutes to draw the diagram on a piece of paper (even if you can't see the piece of paper yourself). This is not ideal, but it's better than nothing. Drawing things out can indeed be extremely useful in solving these types of problem.

Answer 2

You can use online whiteboard like Mural or Miro.

Answer 3

Zoom has facilities to share an iPad or other tablet screen. This is how all the college instructors I know have been replacing our whiteboards for virtual lectures. If a candidate doesn’t own a tablet, I suppose you can fall back on hackier solutions, but I suspect it could be worth the company buying a couple of tablets and actually shipping them to candidates who need them, at least in later stages, if you really want the whiteboard experience.

Interestingly, this is about the first time I’ve ever heard anybody say anything nice about whiteboarding. Plenty of programmers mainly think in actual code, and feel disabled by the lack of access to syntax highlighting, documentation, and such, let alone the Internet, in a whiteboard interview. Such coders may not be disadvantaged by virtual interviews with no whiteboard access.

Answer 4

The candidate can always draw using pen/pencil on a white paper, and show in the video, or you can ask him/her to share screen, and draw using whatever application (s)he is comfortable with. Most of the meeting applications like Zoom and Google have a whiteboard facility too.