| > I have never experienced such an interview, both when I am the interviewer and the interviewee, and I've been thru the entire process at multiple FAANGs. I've been through the all-day on-site interview at two FAANGs and every coding interview involved me standing at the whiteboard for the entire interview. As the saying goes, data is not the plural form of anecdote, but it's certainly common enough as a format that it has to be considered when discussing whiteboard interviews. > The entire interview has this elevated difficulty. You are constantly being judged and evaluated over the course of the interview. I have consistently asked for people to clarify why the Whiteboard part is elevated over any other technical portion in how stressful it is and how much that impacts performance, and I mostly have been attacked with strawmen. I agree that the entire interview has elevated difficulty, but which aspects are intrinsic / essential and which parts could we remove with minimal impact to the effectiveness of the interview? For example, we both seem to be in agreement that writing code with a pen makes the whole interview harder without facilitating what we usually want to measure - the candidate's ability to reason about complex problems and write good code to solve those problems. From the findings in the paper, just having a proctor in the room is correlated with the candidates performing worse on the programming task (as measured by writing code that passes the test cases). I'm sure there are benefits to being able to observe the candidate directly, but those benefits should be weighed against the drawbacks and evaluated in light of whether or not it's really a net positive, regardless of whether the interview process as a whole will still be stressful in other ways. |