That favours people with high charizma and pleasant personality (not same as pleasant to work with) regardless of skills or work ethics. Compared to those, whiteboard or live coding is improvement.
Why have only one option that caters to those that can memorize algorithms? Have multiple types of interviews instead of forcing everyone to take the same type.
You can tailor the whiteboard problems to be something more than just memorizing algorithms. My company I'm at now whiteboarded with me bugs they found on my personal website.
Always this "memorizing algorithms" strawman. If you can't code basic list/tree/graph algorithms on the fly then there are serious holes in your programming ability. This has nothing to do with memorization.
But its not about the list/tree/graph algorithms, its about having the mental flexibility to code the algorithms on the fly. If you can't do a depth-first search on a tree after being given the definition and time to think about it then you may lack the mental flexibility to do arbitrary algorithms in any domain. Intelligence is unspecific to domain, and so showing intelligence in one domain correlates with outcomes in other domains. The list/tree/graph algorithms are just a microcosm of programming skill in general.
Also, my codebase does have an honest to god tree traversal, on the front end no less. This stuff shouldn't be seen as esoteric trivia.
> If you can't do a depth-first search on a tree after being given the definition and time to think about it then you may lack the mental flexibility to do arbitrary algorithms in any domain.
It's this condescending attitude that ensures that companies only hire recent grads instead of people with actual software development experience. I will write you a depth-first search (assuming that, god forbid, my libraries don't have that functionality for some reason) if it's not a contrived example in an interview. But I have to say, so far, 99% of my pure algorithms code have been contrived interview questions.
If you can't do depth-first search in a stressful interview situation that you sneaked away from your actual job for, you might just be a human being. But either way, if your interview process is only interested in testing my knowledge of trivia, instead of my actual development skills (like how I manage complexity or design systems) then I think I'd rather work for more competent people.
