ciqsteve

Whiteboarding itself is a skill. What I learned the hard way:

- There is no insert. If you need to go back and insert a line of code somewhere you must either erase all the code below it to make room (then rewrite said code), or you draw a line from the insertion point to somewhere else on the white board and write the code there. For the former you waste a lot of time. For the later the code quickly becomes hard to follow.

- There is no context driven autocomplete or quick method lookup. If you spend your entire day coding in one language and have done so for the last >3 years you should be fine. If you code in multiple languages and spend time with other tasks (devops for example), you might not realize how much you rely on this.

- The white-boarding process works well (given previous two caveats) if you code in a linear style. If you code iteratively the whiteboard is not your friend.

My recommendation to someone starting the interview process. Go buy a small whiteboard and use it to code solutions to interview questions you find online.

I just finished 'managing' the integration of a service API with a web front-end. It was not at all easy to manage and everyone working was in-house.

Healthcare.gov has 50(!) contractors supervised by HHS?

To fix it they are bringing in 'specialists?' Someone should send everyone in HHS a copy of the Mythical Man Month.

I believe the probability of this thing EVER working are pretty close to zero.