| The analogy to white-board interviews for hiring a musician is: "Here's a couple of pages of unfamiliar sheet music that a second-year student should be able to play. You have an hour to figure out how to muddle through it on an instrument of your choice." People hiring musicians don't do that, because they instead prefer to give candidates 16 bars of complex sheet music, and expect them to play it perfectly during the audition. The programming equivalent would be to give someone a hard take-home problem, let them stew on it, bring them into the interview, and ask them to type in their solution, from memory, into a text file, on a keyboard with a broken Backspace key. That they will then compile, run, and compare the result of to that of the other 60 candidates auditioning for the role. Are you sure you want to do auditions, instead of interviews? > It is ironic that for an industry that is in a sense so subjective that the gates in the hiring process are more concrete. That's because there's fifty thousand correct ways to solve a trivial programming problem, but only 'one' way to correctly play second violin in Vivaldi Four Seasons. Music is a subjective art. Playing music is a mechanical process. My iPod can play music. My iPod can't implement a sorting algorithm. |