[ploxiln]

Other professions hire based on pedigree and looking+sounding the part. I personally prefer a hard skills test.

But of course I would, the latter scenario favored me much more than the former when I was not-yet done with college, and also when I was looking for my second job in a new city.

There's always some complaint in these kinds of threads about whiteboard coding. I love whiteboard coding! I did it a fair bit outside of interviews, just to collaborate with coworkers, in my first and second jobs (but not recently). I did it in Google interviews. (No, they didn't ask any puzzlers about manhole covers or blenders.) It was fun, I'd do it anytime.

[Spooky23]

I don't understand why everyone is ridiculously tough on interviews but wimps with firing.

Just do a 1 year probation, and payout a couple of months severance with an NDA/non-disparagement clause. If the guy sucks, send him off.

When I read these threads I'm always blown away by the time wasted on the hunger games hiring process. One guy on another thread was talking about 5 interviews with homework. What a waste of time.

[twblalock]

It costs a company a lot more to hire someone and then fire them, than it does to never hire them at all. Especially if you give them a few months' severance. That's the most generous probation program I've ever heard of.

[Spooky23]

Only if you demonstrate that this torturous process produces better candidates.

How many FTEs worth of time is spent on interview hunger games?

[bbcbasic]

How much whiteboard coding do you do once you are hired? I'm not talking design but actually writing a sort algo with all the curlies in the right place, on a whitebaord?

[ploxiln]

Not much, maybe once a month. One thing I vaguely recall is the sequence and error handling of some service caching, writing to a database, and putting a message on a queue. Obviously it wasn't about "curlies in the right place". And as mentioned, it wasn't recently, it was about 3 years ago now - the most recent team I work with is very small and half remote.

I still think there are things that are good to be able to do, even if you don't use them regularly. As a bad metaphor, swimmers do some dry-land training...

[dagw]

Do interviewers actually really care about the curlies being in the right place? I've never interviewed in the US, but certainly every interview I've had in Europe that required whiteboard coding only required essentially pseudo-code that looked more or less like the target language.