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Discussion on: The 3 Sins of Software Engineering Interviews

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Bence Szabo

This IDE thing. I think making today's developers program on a whiteboard is like taking a car on a test drive on a road that's covered with huge rocks with a driver that has never driven a manual gearbox car before and you tell them that you won't buy the thing if you spill your coffee.
It's adding more stress to an already stressful situation, whereas in the real world the company spends millions creating a comfortable office environment, pay for the coolest IDEs, employ people who coordinate work and generally try to make life easier. Simply put, that's not how we operate.
I think asking somebody to walk up to a whiteboard and solve some obscure made up problem with a marker in 20mins can lead to a false impression of one's abilities.

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Jacob Simon

So true! Luckily the trend is moving away from whiteboard interviews these days, and instead they’re letting people bring their own laptops into interviews for coding questions. But it’s not a sure thing yet.