[JamesBarney]

> but feel it is silly to have to develop an alternative set of skills in order to signal that they are a good hire

The problem isn't that they have to develop a set of skills that combined with their true skills gives the interviewer a glimpse into their abilities.

It's that it's an entirely different set of skills entirely. We might as well be asking people to learn woodworking in order to showcase their software skills. The ability to sound knowledgeable and make someone like you in 50 minutes is pretty orthogonal to writing good code as a member of a team.

[bootsz]

> it's an entirely different set of skills entirely

I'm not sure whiteboarding-style interviews are entirely orthogonal. They are definitely not a measure of real software engineering ability, but I suspect there is decent correlation, enough to give companies a sufficiently low false-positive rate, which is what they care about. The flip side is you have a high amount of false-negatives, and it sucks to be one of the people who end up in that category, because you know you're good enough but you just didn't pass the arbitrary filter that requires that "entirely different set of skills". I've been there, as I suspect most of us have. It's not fun, but it's hard to see what would motivate these companies to change their practices as long as they feel their false-positive rate is low enough.

[JamesBarney]

A standardized white-boarding interview is probably not completely orthogonal. But too many white board interviews don't have a standardized set of questions, with a standardized set of criteria over which to measure them.

And the ad-hoc tests have very little validity, and rely more on what questions the interview asks, and how confident and charming the interviewee is. Not to mention lots of credentialism. "Candidate Joe didn't answer the question but he's a Googler so that I probably just because I did a bad job explaining that." "Jessica didn't answer the question because she didn't know anything about software".