[tensor]

I don't disagree with most of your post, though I cannot resist commenting on the whiteboard interview test. Writing anything other than rough pseudo code or algorithm sketches on the whiteboard is a silly exercise. It's not reflective of any sort of reality, probably indicates to candidates that you are not working on any interesting problems, and people won't remember exact syntax or library functions for any language that they don't use fairly regularly.

The whiteboard is only useful as an aid in explaining an algorithm. If a candidate can do that without the whiteboard, even better.

[tom_b]

I'm kind of with you on the whiteboard code issue (I was sitting in on the interview in question), especially for a "hard" coding exercise.

My bigger concern is that for a job that specifically highlighted the need for at least some SQL skills and some Java expertise, a candidate that can not, even after prompting, write a for loop in Java (or in any language, when offered the chance to do so in a "favorite" language") or write a SQL statement that joins two tables probably can't do much of anything, let alone work on interesting problems.

Here is the cold, hard truth - I know, both because of my own limitations and the opportunity of the job, that we are not going to get top % hackers. But if you apply to a job where the primary need is coding in blub, I think its fair to expect a simple question or two about basic blub constructs. I myself would be nervous about whiteboard coding for something complex, but also generally offer (in a cover letter) to provide some code examples to talk through at an interview ahead of time.

I think it behooves us all to have at least some baseline expectation to demonstrate some competence. Remember, I'm not thinking that whiteboard coding of an algorithms or anything.

I think a very fair (and concerning to me) insight might be: if you can use Google and an IDE, can you do all that this job requires?