Comment by dionidium
11 years ago
Without commenting on whether this is a good interviewing strategy, surely the point is to sacrifice some potential good hires in favor of definite good hires. In other words, you might be able to write pretty good code even if you can't solve problems on a whiteboard, but, given a choice, why wouldn't we just choose the people who can do that, too?
I think the stated philosophy of interviews like this one is that a false positive is worse than a false negative. Every single one of the responses to that tweet either misses that point or sounds like little more than defensiveness in the wake of a bruised ego.
You might disagree with that interviewing strategy, but you're not addressing it directly.
More or less agree with this. I'm also a Google reject (didn't make it past the phone interview). I didn't take the rejection personally. I don't see how the interview process could be drastically improved. They get a lot of applications and they need some way to filter - there is a standard and it has to be met. With the sheer amount of applications that Google gets it's a virtual guarantee that there will be a subset of people taking the piss regardless of what the interview process is like.
I don't doubt that the engineers who manage to jump through all those hoops are sensational. Personally in the end it just dawned on me that I didn't want to work at Google that badly.
The whole Twitter exchange is a pitiful sour grapes circle jerk, and I'm surprised that it's provoked such a massive response.
> why wouldn't we just choose the people who can do that, too?
I agree with your overall point (why not both?) but how does the interviewer know they can do both if they are only tested on their ability to solve problems on a whiteboard? I don't have a solution (that scales) to this problem but I tend to agree the types of whiteboard problems typically seen in interviews are a bad way to identify good developers.