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Comment by seldo | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure where you've interviewed but everywhere I've worked we always ask what you've done, and at my current company we have no whiteboard interviews. Tech is learning, slowly, how to give proper interviews.

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I suppose asking about the applicant's past experience isn't the kind of thing that "scales" in some organizations, because then you've gone from a double blind experimental procedure to a freewheeling conversation between individual humans.

True. Half the time there is 1 guy (out of the 3-6) who will ask about what you've actually done.

10 minutes out of 4 hours, that's like less than 5% devoted to real world experience.

As someone at a major tech company that is routinely involved in interview loops, I spend at a minimum 25-30 of the 55 minutes I have asking about specific items on the candidate's CV. When white-boarding, I'm interested in two things: a) can they actually write code, and b) how well do they ask questions and collaborate with me when working through the problem.

That said, having gone through loops from the other side, I know this isn't always the case and that your mileage may vary.

Well, shit. I had a whiteboard interview earlier and I was silent while working through the problems. I had a lot things going on in my mind but hadn't taken the time to verbalize them at all.

If the only thing the interviewer has to judge your skill on is what you wrote on the board, that's what will be used. When I'm interviewing, I'm trying to gauge how they approach a problem, how well they can reason through a solution, whether they see the assumptions they're making and the impact those have on the solution, what the limitations are of the algorithm they came up with, etc. It's really hard to see most of this if the candidate doesn't talk at all.

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