[GuiA]

Let me preface this by saying I despise whiteboarding as much as you do. I’ve been rejected from jobs dozens of time, and only got a handful of job offers in my ~10 year career so far.

But - all interviews are, in essence, is an exercise in virtue signaling. Can you do the local dance to prove that you belong?

If anything, whiteboard interviews are not the worst thing ever. I am from a Western European country, and my dad is a chemical engineer at a large chemical company with 30+ years experience, many patents, books, etc.

When I explained to him the interview processes I had to go through to get jobs in Silicon Valley, he exclaimed “oh wow that’s great! I wish we had that! Our interview process is a 1 hour conversation with a manager, and if you went to the same school as them or share the same hobbies, you get the job. We hire so many mediocre people because of that, I wish we actually asked them to solve technical problems”.

Now that I think about it, I actually declined a job offer once from a startup because their interview process with me was a 1 hour presentation where I showed some of my work, and then a phone call with HR. I thought to myself - wow, this is too easy. If I get an offer this easily, what caliber of people am I going to be working with?

Pick your poison.

[Gibbon1]

My first boss used to do a short quiz just to weed out anyone that was wasting his time and that was that. But of course programming culture is hypertoxic so that's been turned into the roommate interview scene in Shallow Grave.

[thepp1983]

Programming culture is not hypertoxic. Maybe it is in the United States in the UK pretty much everyone just sits down and gets on with it.

[Gibbon1]

I work in the US with engineers, techs, and business side people who obviously aren't programmers as well as software people. What I find is those people's culture is much less toxic than software[1].

However my experience with a couple of UK programmers was they were alright.

[1] Except for game developers and embedded.

[alchemism]

Speaking personally, I was a bit surprised at the culture I experienced the first time I worked alongside younger American programmers, as opposed to my prior experiences with remote offshore teammembers, onshore H1B programmers, and the American greybeards from the earlier IT era.

[thepp1983]

In my general experience. I think with younger men in their twenties it can be a little difficult if management lets them get away with being a bit too unprofessional. They wanna prove themselves so sometimes a bit too much testorone in the room can cause a few arguments. Once everyone is past 30 that normally stops.

Indian developers in the UK have essentially got won the Willy Wonka Gold ticket as the salaries in the UK are much higher and they just work 12+ hours a day and keep their heads down. There is a higher number of female developers in my experience come over. But that could be just my impressions.