[bmitc]

Even worse is when you solve the problem in a way they didn't expect or plan on, and they spend the time derailing you off your solution and back to the one they understand.

I had a miserable interview experience once were I gave a tree processing solution in a functional, tail recursive way. They spent the interview sliding me back into a mutable, iterative approach, and it really through me off. Additionally, I don't think they even understood the functional solution. Half the time, it felt like I was needing to guess where they'd like me to go.

And we all know working and software development is nothing like that. At no point in that particular interview was I asked to describe projects I had worked on. When I left, they had no idea what I had even worked on previously because they didn't ask. They just asked a tree question, which someone could look up over an evening or weekend. So pointless.

[plutonorm]

The scariest part of all this is that people think this is a good way to filter candidates. It shows you that the company is populated by stress tolerant, herd mentality thinkers. I see them as a cross between army grunts and high school nerds. Simple fast logic, drawn to rules and systems, prone to being swayed by appeals to authority. Low sensitivity nervous systems meaning high stress tolerance and low ability to perceive, synthesise and abstract. Working with these guys is like wearing a straight jacket anyway - avoid like the plague. Unless you happen to fit that model, in which case go right ahead, you do you, but please be aware that there are other kinds of human out there who can add value outside of the cookie cutter.

[majormajor]

That's an awful lot of insulting generalization you're labeling people with, simply for being able to handle stress better than you. You are also completely overlooking the people for whom stress-handling doesn't come into play because it's not a very stressful situation for them. (This set of people is interesting to me, because it seems plausible that "gets less stressed by being asked about algorithms and system design" might correlate to "has a higher skill level and finds the problems easier and simpler.")

How would you evaluate a candidate's problem solving skills? "Trust me, I can do it, I just can't show you" doesn't seem particularly compelling if I'm looking to hire someone.

[plutonorm]

And yet here and elsewhere, for the same comment I have more upvotes than downvotes.

Some of what you are saying is accurate, but it's dwarfed by the noise that the different kinds of brains that you interview are producing. One of the most fundamental properties of a brain is it's sensitivity to stimulation. This is how 'activated' it gets by sensory stimulation. A loud annoying sound for one person is barely noticed by another.

People who have reactive nervous systems are introverted, and more easily stressed. It's not a symptom of their upbringing (necessarily, although it can be due to early life trauma, early loss of the mother etc), it's not necessarily about how they think about the ease or difficulty of the interview process - it can merely be from the large amount of information they are perceiving about the emotional and cognitive state of the interviewer.

This sensitivity of the nervous system may not be what you are looking for and that is the nature of the world. But do not be surprised when those you exclude because of a fundamental aspect of their nature react to the exclusion negatively.

Sensitive people have a lot to give. Sensitivity correlates well with openness and openness brings in fresh ideas and new approaches. Openness also correlates with IQ.

The reasoning is that - aside from the studies that you can look up and read - that the sensitive nervous system is more alert to its environment and therefore more creative - as creativity seems to be, in part, the ability to combine environmental perceptions fluidly. In order to be creative you have to perceive a lot and let it sit. This kind of personality also tends to process events more deeply, thoughts spread further and wider. This is bad for straightforward logic, because it creates background noise, but it's great for getting the big picture.

High sensitivity is quite prevalent within the gifted population. You also find a significantly greater proportion of gifted people afflicted with anxiety, which is not surprisingly connected with reactivity - sensitivity. There is a theory of giftedness which describes the phenomena entirely in terms of excitabilities. By excluding the easily excitable from your organisation you are literally excluding the gifted. I am - if the raven matrices you can find inline are to be believed at the bottom end of gifted. And yet I can appear to be an idiot if run through the standard white board process. I deal with it using pregabalin which deadens the nervous system enough to remain functional during an interview. But I do contract work these days and dont have to jump through hoops anymore.

So by only including individuals like yourself you are excluding sources of creativity, you are limiting yourself to a particular kind of person and by extension limiting the kinds of thoughts and approaches your organisation can have.

It's similar and indeed perhaps intertwined with the exclusion that minorities of all kinds find within the workplace dominated by the kind of culture that sees whiteboard interviews as a good thing.