[vp89]

Its counter intuitive but whiteboarding is actually more inclusive IMO. Anyone who has 35 bucks can lock themselves in a room for 3 months with a copy of CTCI and a pad of paper and come out with an 80+k salary. You cant do that in any other industry.

If we judge candidates purely on work experience that just favors the incumbents who have already broken into the industry and presumably already quite comfortable in life.

[entee]

That assumes the interview accurately measures something useful. The more I read about this area the more I think a 1-2h pre-interview practical coding assignment, then a 1 on 1 discussion during the interview is better. You then get to understand how they think, how they design solutions, and some sense of how they interact. In other words, how they'd do the job.

[vp89]

Good design instincts takes lots of hard earned real world experience to develop. I wouldnt expect the average 21 year old programmer to really know how to design stuff maybe they can provide me crammed textbook answers but that is as "irrelevant" as whiteboarding.

I think a good approach is to not emphasize the whiteboard as much for senior hires, so people with good work experience can mostly get in on their resume and design questions and people with lesser experience still have the opportunity to break into these top companies by grinding algo questions.

[mahyarm]

Many interviews are not pure whiteboard algos. And many interview processes are different, each company is unique.

When I interviewed a couple of years ago, I saw various kinds of interviews at companies:

* 1-2hr on site coding exercise, with the internet, alone.

* 'Here is a 100loc piece of code, fix all the problems with it'.

* Chat with product / manager / team lunch. ('Are you an asshole' test / 'culture' interview / scenario testing)

* Design / outline an app that does X, with boxes and lines on a whiteboard.

* Solve this algorithmic problem on a white board / on your computer.

The reason why everyone freaks out about the algo interview it's the only interview type that most engineers have to prepare for. The other 4 usually you don't have to do much prep work at all.

[digler999]

> a 1-2h pre-interview practical coding assignment

then you'll only select for people who have nothing better to do with their time than to donate it to your fun programming escapade. Experienced devs will say it's not worth their time and wont apply.

[kafkaesq]

Anyone who has 35 bucks can lock themselves in a room for 3 months with a copy of CTCI and a pad of paper and come out with an 80+k salary.

If anything, this just tells us what a low bar to entry the CTCI drill is.

Say you had a pool of candidates of roughly comparable intelligence, educational background, and work experience. And then you gave them 3 months of all living expenses paid† to go an "improve themselves as software development professionals."

One of them comes back and says "I cranked out an MVP (relying in part on a language I only barely knew to that point) that's actually being used by people, and getting good reviews. Here, check out he repo."

Another says, "I thought it was about time I got a handle on this machine learning stuff. Here's a project I did, based on a generalization of some ideas in such-and-such paper. Wish I had more time to spend on it, but looks like my error rate's not too bad."

And another says "It took literally 6-8 hours of devoted practice, every day. But I finally got some serious traction on Japanese. I honestly thought I'd never be able to do that."

And then there's the guy who says "Oh, I looked myself in my apartment and did every exercise in CTCI. Because, you know, I heard that's what you're supposed to do. Damn, my back is sore. I think I need a better chair or something."

Who would you rather talk to first?

† Which costs a lot more than 35 bucks, BTW.

[kafkaesq]

EDIT: 'looked' -> 'locked'

[mdturnerphys]

I get your point, but I'll also point out that costs a lot more than $35 to lock yourself in a room for 3 months. Many people don't have guaranteed room and board for that long.

[ThrowawayR2]

>Many people don't have guaranteed room and board for that long.

If a person has been in the industry for more than than three years and doesn't have 3 months cash reserve saved up[1], they are severely mismanaging their finances. _Particularly_ since we're seeing increasing warnings from the financial sector that we're in a bubble already.

[1] barring some unexpected catastrophic expense

[drewrv]

Having the ability to lock yourself in a room and study for three months is an enormous privilege, particularly if the thing you're studying is only marginally useful.

[branchless]

This is the amazing thing about IT. Also once you are in the computer doesn't care what your background is, what your colour is etc. It will refuse to compile the bad code of an ivy league grad.