[arenaninja]

Absolutely. I've seen companies send an intern to do a technical interview for someone with over 10 years of experience. The intern's feedback was that the guy had a lot of experience, but made some syntactic error on a whiteboard exercise so it was a pass. I don't know who gets to dictate shit like that, but it's absolutely broken. For reference two days later I overheard the same intern saying that JavaScript was fully synchronous.

As a fun aside, I've seen people send out HackerRank evaluations for entry level positions and I think that's ludicrous.

The best interview I have had was me Skyping with one of the devs and he gave me a link where we were able to share a browser session (for the life of me I can't remember the name of the site), but he described the problem and as I typed he could see what I typed. There was no emphasis on result that I can remember, just the process of writing code, talking it out loud and seeing code evolve and asking whether certain edge cases should be considered.

What's most broken, I think, is the fact that interviewing is an uneven, broken experience that's different everywhere you go because no one really knows how to interview. I haven't seen any company take metrics on whether their process is good or helpful or filters out too many people or not enough.

[dmead]

Agreed. The best two interviews I've had was one that was similar to your experience. The other was being invited to pair with a team member for an afternoon.

Interviews where people just wait for you to make a mistake should be not a thing anymore.

(Looking at you, Google)