Hey, I'm Steven Mercatante and I build things for the web.
I'm a full stack software engineer with over 15 years of experience building websites, mobile apps, APIs, CMSs, and ETL pipelines.
I think it's broken in some ways, and at some companies. I've seen this from both ends of the interview table.
The ways in which I think the process is broken is when interviewers place too large an emphasis on computer science trivia, and not enough on real world experience and pragmatism. I once had a phone screen where the interviewer gave me a trivia question copied directly from LeetCode, and insisted it was representative of the work they do there every day (spoiler alert: it wasn't.) This is the laziest way to interview. What if I had solved that puzzle a few days prior, or Googled the answer and finished it in record time? That's a poor way to measure ability.
I've also had interviews where you're forbidden from looking at the docs and can't use your IDE of choice. That's not how any software developer works. Why place these artificial constraints on someone? Interviewing is already a stressful experience; making it harder for the candidate doesn't make much sense.
On the flip side, the best interview experiences I've had all involved the company asking about challenging projects I've worked on, had me work on coding exercises that were representative of the work they do day-to-day, and let me work with the tools of my choosing. They weren't testing my rote memorization ability, they were testing my ability to reason about a problem, communicate clearly, anticipate edge cases, and solve real issues. Even if I didn't pass these interviews, I still greatly appreciated how they were administered.
When I was the one doing the interviewing, I did have candidates do some whiteboard exercises, but they were problems that myself and my colleagues had to solve on real projects. Even then, I wanted to remove this part of the interview. I'd rather pair program with someone on their machine and with their tools of choice to see how they work.
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I think it's broken in some ways, and at some companies. I've seen this from both ends of the interview table.
The ways in which I think the process is broken is when interviewers place too large an emphasis on computer science trivia, and not enough on real world experience and pragmatism. I once had a phone screen where the interviewer gave me a trivia question copied directly from LeetCode, and insisted it was representative of the work they do there every day (spoiler alert: it wasn't.) This is the laziest way to interview. What if I had solved that puzzle a few days prior, or Googled the answer and finished it in record time? That's a poor way to measure ability.
I've also had interviews where you're forbidden from looking at the docs and can't use your IDE of choice. That's not how any software developer works. Why place these artificial constraints on someone? Interviewing is already a stressful experience; making it harder for the candidate doesn't make much sense.
On the flip side, the best interview experiences I've had all involved the company asking about challenging projects I've worked on, had me work on coding exercises that were representative of the work they do day-to-day, and let me work with the tools of my choosing. They weren't testing my rote memorization ability, they were testing my ability to reason about a problem, communicate clearly, anticipate edge cases, and solve real issues. Even if I didn't pass these interviews, I still greatly appreciated how they were administered.
When I was the one doing the interviewing, I did have candidates do some whiteboard exercises, but they were problems that myself and my colleagues had to solve on real projects. Even then, I wanted to remove this part of the interview. I'd rather pair program with someone on their machine and with their tools of choice to see how they work.