> At a certain point, your resume should speak for itself. The fact that experienced engineers with impressive resumes are put through these types of interviews is insulting and frustrating to the interviewees.
Only to bad interviewees.
You'd be shocked to hear the number of impressive résumés I have seen who turned out to be absolute no-hires after 20mn on a white board. By "absolute no hire", I mean the kind where some of the interviewers tell me in the debriefing "I will quit if we hire this guy".
Not all excellent engineers have impressive résumés but they all share a common characteristic in my experience: they all really enjoyed working on the problems I asked them to solve on the white board. I even had some of them be disappointed when we ran out of time because we were having interesting conversations about the problem.
> You'd be shocked to hear the number of impressive résumés I have seen who turned out to be absolute no-hires after 20mn on a white board.
Hmm, at least in my experience it's really quick and easy to tell if someone is bullshitting about their resume or not by simply talking about the different projects they worked on. I know a few developers who didn't go to a 4 year school so they don't know all of the correct terms or algorithms (one even interviewed for Google and failed) but I would hire them in a heart beat because they are really awesome.
I still feel some sort of pair-programming exercise or something similar is better than simply trying to solve problems on a white board. Unless you're in a SCIF you're going to have access to the internet to refresh your memory, etc so I've never found utility in asking academic questions. In fact I've had a few people who could pass the academic questions but couldn't build an application to save their life so I don't even bother anymore.
>By "absolute no hire", I mean the kind where some of the interviewers tell me in the debriefing "I will quit if we hire this guy".
That's just a self-reinforcing selection bias - you hire people that are good at these kinds of problems/enjoy them - you filter out the rest by default and it becomes ingrained in the culture - it doesn't say anything about the suitability of the candidates you filtered out. If you said "we hired a guy who had a great resume but he couldn't do algorithmic problems, turned out to be a bad fit for the company" - that would still be a single data point but at least it would be relevant.
Only to bad interviewees.
You'd be shocked to hear the number of impressive résumés I have seen who turned out to be absolute no-hires after 20mn on a white board. By "absolute no hire", I mean the kind where some of the interviewers tell me in the debriefing "I will quit if we hire this guy".
Not all excellent engineers have impressive résumés but they all share a common characteristic in my experience: they all really enjoyed working on the problems I asked them to solve on the white board. I even had some of them be disappointed when we ran out of time because we were having interesting conversations about the problem.