I would argue that pair programming or take home projects do a far better job than the standard Whiteboard Algo interviews. In fact I don't think it's even close but SV engineers have been captured by this Whiteboard Interview Stockholm Syndrome/Hazing and continue to perpetuate the insane idea that there is no better way.
And their education, previous employment, etc.
No one makes a neuro-surgeon perform a surgery before hiring them.
True, but I also know that a neurosurgeon graduated from an accredited school, did an internship at an accredited hospital, and then passed a standardized licensing exam.
If we had that for engineers we wouldn't need to test their skills either.
When I was doing hiring, I would see resumes of people with 10+ years of experience who couldn't write a simple loop in their favorite language. If you've been coding for 10 years, you should be able to write a simple loop. That's the problem we're solving for here.
I think we will, eventually. Other fields of engineering already do, of course. Software is new and not that many people have been killed by bad software (unlike bad buildings), but I think we'll get there.
That's the problem some interviews solve for. FAANG interviews take it to another level.
The bar is being raised all the time as much as it is painful and hard for me to see/experience this :(.
We have that for "real" engineers. Doesn't stop many of them from being atrocious at their job. Doesn't stop doctors either, for that matter.
What you are asking for, is a surgeon to retake the boards every time they change hospitals. Or a licensed professional engineer to retake the PE exam everytime they change jobs.
The algorithms asked in interviews are rarely implemented in a job. All they prove is how much you studied and the author of the article proves that.
What our industry is missing, IMHO is required certification and training. Doctors and nurses have yearly training and related exams to keep their certification. That's why a hospital can hire staff based on a license...Not becsuse the items you mentioned. But our industry would never go that route, which is a longer rant.
Also if peope who can't write for loops are passing your phone screen... You might want to update your phone screen.
Yes, just as you retake your driving exams every five years, you should retake your engineering exams (unless you are an accredited engineering instructor, in which case the license becomes permanent) every ten years.
Uhh... I haven't taken a driving test in 17 years (and two states ago, to boot).
...and meets ongoing continuing education requirements.
> If we had that for engineers we wouldn't need to test their skills either.
We do have that for professional engineers.
We don't have it for people working in software whose job titles have become (but largely weren't for similar roles a few decades ago) "engineer".
Which are a joke. Attending conferences and weekend workshops take care of this.
Sure, professional licensing provides fairly weak guarantees, but it's more than exist in software, hence FizzBuzz.
While I agree with this, the FAANG interviews take it too far. Simple fizzbuzz is enough to weed out these completely incompetent engineers. If they pass that, accomplishments and experience are going to be a much better indicator of engineering ability imo.
Unfortunately, this seems to be poorly correlated with whether people can actually code.
There is also an experimental virtual surgery simulator for objective evaluation - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26153114
How does one not have time for pair programming? It's the exact same time commitment, from both the interviewer and interviewee, as a whiteboarding session. It's just a different format for the interview.
I don't think it's the case that people don't like interviews. I think you're making a strawman. I'm not going to go and say that you're part of the cycle of SV engineer being hazed, reproducing it and exhibiting a sunken cost fallacy/bias towards the way you've done it, but it's possible. I don't think this is the ideal way to interview.
What's more, I've been seeing actual improvement on the state of the art in this area. Platforms like Karat et al (not sure if Karat is the best in this area but I did have a good experience with a company that used them and interviewed me well) are actually incentivized to minimize false positives and negatives rather than just one. You might be surprised at how much better a good technical interviewer can be than an average strong engineer.
Google allows you to write code on a Chromebook instead of a whiteboard (don't know if it's for everyone or some people). Is that pair programming? Or do you mean actually working with your preferred IDE/text editor, terminal, browser to look stuff up?