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Comment by bumper_crop | Hacker News Reader

> Why interviewers were all transcribing the whiteboard rather than taking photos I have no clue.

It makes it easier to reason about the code. It's the difference between typing out the answer from Stack Overflow, v.s. copy pasting it. At least for me, writing the code down at the speed the candidate does triggers the error checking part of my brain.

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It's just because the interviewing tool you have to put your notes into at Google takes text and not pictures :-). The hiring committee will actually look at this, and this is a different person from the interviewer.

Ok, but they were transcribing from the whiteboard onto paper. So everything I wrote must have been transcribed twice before it reached the hiring committee.

2006 was... early. I don't remember when HCs were formed, but there's no way the internal ATS had any level of sophistication, if it even existed then.

(Admittedly this is all years before my time.)

From what the recruiter told me, there was a hiring committee but their recommendations had to be approved by the founders before an offer could go out.

Isn't this a bit of revisionist thinking? I don't know that cameras of that quality were commonplace in 2006. It's not like you could just pull out your iPhone. And most digital cameras weren't much better (i.e. I wouldn't trust being able to read handwriting from their pictures). So then what, you supply each interviewer with a roll of film and a company darkroom?

It's also easier to write your own notes down this way too.

> between typing out the answer from Stack Overflow, v.s. copy pasting it

Thanks to co-pilot, these are approaching being one and the same (:

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