[airfoil]

It’s happened to me. I’m terrible at the whiteboard in these situations. I have a severe disdain for whiteboard sessions. I’m an experienced engineer, but I’m likely to fumble at the whiteboard.

When I’ve interviewed candidates I make it a point to talk about something they’ve worked on and drill down into it. If they need the whiteboard to convey something, that’s great. We’re having a conversation and I’m not giving them a test. I’ll ask about potential optimizations and/or improvements, but I try my best not to make things adversarial. This has worked out really well. The best conversations have resulted in great hires in my experience.

[rootusrootus]

I think this is a good point. As someone who also fumbles a bit if you put me at a whiteboard and start asking esoteric algorithm questions.

So when I am hiring someone for my team, I ask them about projects they are familiar with, and drill down into those. Puts them at ease and you pretty quickly get to know if they are talking out of their ass or not. Then after we get through that, if things are going well, I'll bring up the kinds of problems we're working on and see if it piques their interest.

[bra-ket]

+1, I've been hired like this many times and hired people to my team in exactly the same way - discuss the projects on resume in detail.

The algorithm quizzes that are so popular these days are just dumb.

[drugme]

Strong agreement. There's really no need to make the process anywhere near as adversarial as it usually is (by default) these days. Equivalent (or actually much better, in my subjective view) insights can be gotten by purely collaborative, explorative routes of interaction.

All it takes is a little bit of creativity and empathy.