I think I’ve done maybe 30 interviews? Only three of them were the full blown whiteboard for 5 hours process. The first two I failed at the beginning of my career and in hindsight I was properly rejected. The most recent one just made me feel like I’d earned it. The leetcode grinding helped, but my years of experience helped more.

IMO if a company messes around with soft skills, take homes, techno chit chat, long lunches, brutal arcane automated domain knowledge screenings, shibboleths, “day in the life”, present your solution to the group, heuristics, or some other creative way to justify their own biases, I can be fairly confident that I’ll have at least a few co-workers that really just can’t code very well.

I have not met an engineer at my current company who didn’t impress me when I dig into their code a little. There are low performers, but even they produce excellent code when they feel like it.

Nothing is more frustrating than taking a day to interview and getting maybe 30 minutes of watery technical challenge.

I guess the splitting point is thinking that whiteboard interviews select candidates that are good coders - a point I have an entire career of anecdotes to disagree with. YMMV, as with everything.

edit Also, to be clear, you seem very proud of your interview, your company and coworkers, and I do not mean to discredit your pride or success. I am simply pointing out that your experiences are not universal experiences and might be due to lots of other factors, totally unrelated to interview methodology (healthy attrition rates, supportive teams, constructive code review, etc).

To the edit: more like I was deeply unsatisfied with each and every non-whiteboard interview process.

This is regardless of outcome, including many offers and years of working at companies with broken interview processes.

I don’t think whiteboarding is a great methodology, but the other methodologies are worse.

As an interviewer, I find it stressful to give whiteboard problems and my data point usually feels fairly noisy. At startups I preferred giving a tiny take home and working with the candidate on extending it in an open ended way.

As a candidate, I refuse to do take homes (known too many take homes)

The interviews I had, usually are a discussions about the projects I had done and the choices I had made and questions that stem from there. I am not sure what is unsatisfying about interviews like that.

This interview process selects for someone with whom the interviewer might enjoy having meetings.

I’d imagine it’s very hard to distinguish between a good talker and a good worker. Maybe some people can do it, but this is not a skill set I’d expect everyone conducting interviews to possess.

The data shows that humans are terrible at every kind of interview assessment. This is why I appreciate an approach with mechanized layers such as “ask problem with known answer, take notes”

This conversation has been beaten to death, but I'll bite.

I think the problem with whiteboardy-type interviews is they've become closer to trivia. The fact that you grinded LeetCode and others read CTCI kind of prove that, no? As in, people go far out of their way to learn a skill _just to pass the interview_.

> I’d imagine it’s very hard to distinguish between a good talker and a good worker. Maybe some people can do it, but this is not a skill set I’d expect everyone conducting interviews to possess.

Interviewing is a skill and should be treated as such. This means possessing a set of skills any dev off the floor won't necessarily have, and that should be expected. 99% of devs don't have the skills required to conduct a whiteboard interview as an interviewer correctly either, and yet that seems to be generally accepted as okay.

> The data shows that humans are terrible at every kind of interview assessment.

Exactly, which is why, in my posts above, I pointed at things other than the interview as reasons you might be very happy with the quality of your coworkers work. It seems silly to say "The data shows that humans are terrible at every kind of interview assessment", but then also attribute anything from your job to a specific style of interview assessment, right?

You'd get further as a company by investing in training, code quality (review, analysis, etc), leadership, and healthy firing processes.

> There are plenty of big tech companies that pay well, offer a lot of freedom, interesting tech, but are also not FAANG companies with silly interviewing practices.

Names? I’m genuinely interested in places paying near 400k/yr but without stringent whiteboard exercises. Haven’t seen them tho...

> 400k/yr

Are you currently making 400k a year?

They pay that much. https://www.levels.fyi/ I'm only going to be joining FAANG or similar if they pay that much as I have no incentive to otherwise.

My personal situation doesn't seem relevant to the question. Depending on how you look at it - I am. It's just that over half of it isn't liquid right now - but will likely be next year or the year after.

> They pay that much. https://www.levels.fyi/

Very much aware what they pay.

> I'm only going to be joining FAANG or similar if they pay that much as I have no incentive to otherwise

If this is your perspective, best of luck to you, I hope it works out. You've ignored most of what I was trying to say, which is fine. I hope you find the success you're looking for.

The alternative is work on blah-blah-blah but make literally half as much. For people who live in very expensive regions - FAANG and the similar are the only options to a semi-regular middle-class lifestyle. When non-updated 1930's homes that are 1000sqft on 4000sqft lots are regularly going for over $1.7mil - you can't really afford a typical middle class lifestyle on $180k/yr income.

You don't need to explain to me the economics of San Francisco. If you prioritize living in San Francisco over everything, you should try to make as much money as you possibly can. Best of luck.