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I think what Google tries to find are the engineers with creativity, skill and ability to work intelligently at a problem which they haven't seen before.

It's important to know how a person approaches a hard new problem and how easily or not they give up. I'd guess that a person who didn't solve a hard problem, but got close enough by displaying creativity, curiousness and a solid thought process might have an edge over a person that implemented a familiar algorithm with ease but got a little flustered, and didn't show much creativity or inquisitiveness, when challenged with something new.

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I think you want to think that way, that whiteboard interviews have a shred of competency about them. I bet you dollars to doughnuts though 9/10 times a company will hire someone who can regurgitate algorithms rather than an eccentric who can't get them right but thinks really cleverly.

It seems this criticism is of the interviewer making a poor decision based on missed/incorrect observations, not with the whiteboard interview itself.

Whiteboard interviews might miss eccentrics who can't express their clever thoughts verbally or visually, but it can depend on how tuned in the interviewer is to these eccentricities or how much value their team puts on expressive skills.

Algorithm/data structure interviews, whiteboard or not, also have the added benefit of being exceptionally good at eliminating candidates that:

1) Drastically misrepresent their skills

2) Give up easily at difficult tasks

3) Don't seek help from others

4) Frequently have a bad attitude

I've never answered it wrong and gotten hired for my "thought process" even if I was close. I had to fart around on my own for another ~15 minutes to fix my bugs to make it work. But it seems they just want a guy who memorized it and pretends to discover the perfect solution on the first try.

On two occasions I have "re-interviewed" current or past developers who wanted to move up from working on extremely simple low-complexity code / sysadmin work, and start working on our flagship project. In both cases the team leads and I didn't think these people were qualified to do so, but the candidates were really convinced they were. These were employees who had come into the company through non-standard channels, so hadn't experienced our normal interviews.

I had them attempt to solve the problems on a whiteboard that I would give to our intern candidates. Both totally bombed hard, and our other "re-interviewers" had the same result when they asked some design-related and algorithmic related questions.

This wasn't "regurgitating algorithms". It was basic problem-solving and software design. From their track record of development we didn't believe them to be qualified (despite their own opinion of themselves), and they only confirmed it by totally bombing the "re-interview" process (which was identical to our normal interview process).

Nothing you said actually means they could not have done the job. You basically said, we gave them a test and they failed so clearly the test was a good idea.

The only way to validate your highering process is to randomly accept people you would otherwise fail. Anything else is meaningless.

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