Hacker News Reader

#2 is demonstrably wrong.

Of course there will be exceptions, but, given two candidates, the one who did better will get the offer. At big tech companies there is no shortage of people who ace a white-board problem.

Also, if you interview with multiple people for a position (and do multiple white-board problems) you can get an offer without acing all of them.

Well yeah, but that's not what it said. I've had the occasional complete whiteboard disaster (not really my thing) that ended up with offers, including pools where people did bang-up whiteboard work.

There's a lot more at play in any reasonable place than whiteboard performance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com