[Gratsby]

Software developers are not dancing monkeys and should not be treated as such.

Do software sales reps get told to "sell me this shampoo" during an interview? Do they have to whiteboard the structure of an e-mail campaign? No. Because it's no indication of whether or not they can identify and build a relationship with a person at an enterprise that has purchasing power.

If you are putting someone through a coding exercise, it should be simply to query the basics - does this person write readable code. Does this person make comments or use logging?

Anything beyond that and you are looking for good candidates to fail, especially if you are trying to make them do it on the spot in front of an audience.

"Read this file, reverse the strings, and output the results to another file" - people can go months without reading/writing files in a given language and how many times in your professional life did you ever have to reverse a string?

"Explain the difference between a quick sort and a merge sort?" Who cares except when you are reviewing existing code and you look it up to see if there's an optimization to be made for your particular use case?

Being a good software developer takes a lot more than can be determined from a white boarding or code writing exercise. It takes good critical thinking. It takes the ability to work on a detail item while maintaining a view of the big picture pragmatically. It takes the ability to teach and communicate across technical boundaries. It takes the ability to identify, estimate LOE of, and prioritize tasks. It takes so much more than you can glean from an exercise flawed at the outset.

Look at the code bases for just about any existing software project public or private and you'll see code that was written by someone who would have done things differently if given a chance. Even when given autonomy over a project and an endless timeline we don't do things perfectly. Why should anybody be expected to write something perfect during an interview?

Developer interviews should be friendly and curious. You have to get along with the new hire, and that developer will have to succeed in your environment. Find the best person who meets those two basic requirements and who knows about the specific area where your existing shortcomings are, and you have a winner.

[sghi]

I do agree with you on all the rest of the points, but just to say I started out in software and IT sales (but now much happier in a very different field) and I have absolutely been asked to both sell interviewers pens and random products and to have lots of imaginary phone conversations.

Funnily enough, anywhere that asked me to do that turned out to be a pretty rubbish place to work...

[andreis_]

I've interviewed at Google, and their phone screening questions are exactly that, some basic coding exercise. E.g. how would you serialize a binary tree, or find the largest substring in lexicographical order.