I ask about how applicants have implemented things and bang around the edges with questions to gauge the depth of their understanding.
I myself flat out told recruiters I don't do whiteboard coding. If the interview requires that, don't bother putting me up. I'm more than happy to answer architecture questions, deep dive on what I've done, look at my github. However, I refuse to stand there and whiteboard algorithms for employers. I'm not good at coding when people stare at me, so I'm not going to.
In turn, I don't do that to candidates. Having a technical dialog is great. You can easily sort of the pretenders and get a real good sense if they are a good team player, which ranks almost as highly as technical chops.
I've interviewed at maybe 15-20 companies over the years and never not had to whiteboard or live code in some way. The thought of not having to seems so foreign to me.
Out of the six, four have been tech startups including the one I am in now. The industries have been cybersecurity (x2), online retail, and online marketing.
The two non-startups have been in education and healthcare.
2016 was the last time I didn't have the luxury of looking while jobless, but I was still pretty picky. I already knew I didn't like white boarding, so I started to warn recruiters that I wasn't good at it. Two early interviews, I told recruiters this, and they both urged me to go to their interviews anyway. I went ahead thinking it would be good practice.
Not surprisingly, I wasn't offered because I just wasn't that interested, and it showed in the interviews. I remember getting a bit curt in one interview because the last person that I interviewed with (going on 4 hours), asked me the same coding question as the first person.
After that experience, I became more inflexible on my no-coding interview requirements. It probably was just dumb luck, but this wasn't a problem, I was told. Two more companies after that were at companies that did architecture interviews centered around data platforms, and I eventually took one offer.
Everyone wants a miniature throwaway app, including project setup and test usually. Then you get a problem when one library you wanted to use doesn't install easily, or you have some random problem that takes an hour to debug.
Last time I got failed on a number of things many of which weren't asked for. Linting failed on two whitespaces, as I didn't have pylint set up on my home machine. I should have returned json, rather than html, despite the task asking for a 'page, no need for styling'. And I didn't provide a setup.py, despite it not being asked for. I provided the most difficult integration test to implement, but they complained I didn't add more unit tests, even though they has said to describe what tests you would have implemented if you were short on time, which I did.
For someone I want to hire there is almost always a "Beautiful Mind" moment. They stop trying to distill information and start just start talking about all the little details they needed to iron out to get it working right. That when I know they actually did the work and are not just a taking credit for being on a project.
Why did you choose that over other approaches?
Did you use an ORM or raw queries?
What was the O(n) on that operation?
What kind of database did you access?
How did you add that to the CI/CD pipeline?
Just flex the questions for whatever and the people that did not do the work fall apart. Then you have solid devs that show up every day and do the work. You also get the bonus of the dev knowing their new boss knows their shit.
Hash maps are one of them. If you're not aware of their performance benefits, it will probably impact the quality of your work.
I think it would be fair to test for that with a scenario where a hash map is required, and see what they do. No coding involved, just "what would you do here".
We don't ask people to spell things out if they claim they speak English on their resume, so why bother with the basics? I'll trust that the schools are doing their job.