This is sounds like a very pretty typical software engineer interview process. The fact that these kinds of interviews suck, don't produce good hires, and yield a ridiculous amount of false negatives has been beaten to death.
Unless you're Google (or Facebook), you are not getting thousands of applications a day. You don't need to emulate their hiring process. They do it for a reason (practicality) whereas it seems others do it out of pure snobbery. Whiteboard coding is worthless (barring simple fizzbuzz tests which can be done over the phone anyway). I mean how pompous does this shit sound:
"All candidates eventually figure out that they will need to add an auxiliary data structure that maintains a map from a 32 bit integer to a 64 bit pointer, because of the aforementioned ten pound sack. Do they know that there are off-the-shelf map classes? If not, do they have confidence that they could write one?"
Eric Lippert is originally from Microsoft though, so I guess that shouldn't surprise me. After all, they're the ones that started asking "Why is a manhole cover round?" in software engineering interviews.
Much respect goes to tptacek that outlines a much better and enlightened alternative.
Regardless of whether you or tptacek has the better method for hiring coders, I have much more problem with dvt's tone in his post than yours in the article. Hope this kind of response won't discourage you from posting more, as I've had a lot of value from your writing in the past and found this article interesting as well.
I second this. I've read a lot of your writings and have even watched your episode of 'Checking in with Erik Meijer', both of are very informative. Thanks for writing this article.
Oh wow: now this is a solid example of HN fandom. Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Dropbox, Evernote, Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, Square, PayPal and countless others are hiring their engineers using some variation of whiteboard coding. Engineers in those companies built literally 99% of the technology the author of the comment above uses every bloody day. From the browser he used to leave his comment, to operating system to run the said browser and the phone in his pocket to notify him of new entries on HN to open with that browser.
For some, this is not good enough proof though. A local star running an obscure company is certainly more enlightened -- because, you know, he wrote a blog post on hiring.
There's some evidence that the iPhone in your pocket, for example, may have been built via forced manual/child labor in Taiwan/Vietnam/China etc. The fact that the iPhone is a revolutionary (and generally game-changing) product doesn't somehow add to the virtuousness of how it was built.
This is sounds like a very pretty typical software engineer interview process. The fact that these kinds of interviews suck, don't produce good hires, and yield a ridiculous amount of false negatives has been beaten to death.
Unless you're Google (or Facebook), you are not getting thousands of applications a day. You don't need to emulate their hiring process. They do it for a reason (practicality) whereas it seems others do it out of pure snobbery. Whiteboard coding is worthless (barring simple fizzbuzz tests which can be done over the phone anyway). I mean how pompous does this shit sound:
"All candidates eventually figure out that they will need to add an auxiliary data structure that maintains a map from a 32 bit integer to a 64 bit pointer, because of the aforementioned ten pound sack. Do they know that there are off-the-shelf map classes? If not, do they have confidence that they could write one?"
Eric Lippert is originally from Microsoft though, so I guess that shouldn't surprise me. After all, they're the ones that started asking "Why is a manhole cover round?" in software engineering interviews.
Much respect goes to tptacek that outlines a much better and enlightened alternative.