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.
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.
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.
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.
1-2 hours on a practical assignment vs 3 months cramming suggested by the parent comment. Which of those has nothing better to do with their time?
> Experienced devs will say it's not worth their time and wont apply.
Will they? I'm an experienced dev and think this approach sounds great.
Effort does not only include writing a cover letter that will be appealing for the company you apply to instead of just forwarding HR your resume. It also includes small activities like these.
You sound more like a spoiled brat, pardon my French, than an artist looking for new opportunities to make a difference.
The only "difference" I want to make is in my checking account. I want the deposits from my employer to "differ" by greater margins as time advances.
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.
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