[krisdol]

>As an employer I don't care how great your skills are, if you can't walk me through your thought process for 45 minutes you're not going to be overly successful. If you can't incorporate feed back or engage when pressed to change your design you're probably not going to be successful.

The post you're responding to makes a great point that this isn't the normal working environment for 99% of actually-writing-code developers. I discuss and iterate designs with my coworkers/leads/managers/architects just fine, but a surprise algorithmic problem you have to simultaneously solve, draw on a whiteboard, and constantly present to an audience while being timed isn't something I have been great at. I bet many others aren't either. I got good at it after a few interviews last time I was looking for a job; but if I hit the interview trail again today, I'm confident that I would flounder in that setting for a while.

Imagine if, instead, the candidate worked out a project -- maybe at home, or maybe in an interview room for some time -- then you take time to review and understand their work and then go through this back-and-forth process of discussing their work. This would also benefit the candidate's understanding of how you collaborate to problem solve in your work environment.

The problem with this approach is that it requires the interviewer to actually invest time to understand the candidate's work.

Anyway, I hope you see why many see it as a problem that the process for a candidate to succeed at a job interview is to practice interviewing skills rather than demonstrating their engineer skills.