As a developer, I have about 30 repos out on GitHub with plenty of examples I've done in the last three years. If you want to interview me, then go look at my code first. I have a pretty specific style so all the code is consistent. Go look at my code, dissect it, ask me questions about it, ask me why did this instead of that, why I prefer some library over another one, etc. If you feel like my skill set is what you're looking for, then bring me in and then we can see if we're a good fit for each other. If you don't like what you see, then don't bring me in - it's really that easy.
Having one or two whiteboard examples will never, ever, show someone the depth of your skill set. You have to look at their code, which will give you insights a whiteboard interview never will. All the things you mentioned about "basic skills" are obvious when you look at someone's code. Did they use classic or prototypal inheritance? Did they know what closures are? Did they use a factory pattern? Are they using ES6 yet? What tools are they using for their projects? All this and a ton more simply from looking at their code.
And if you're a developer, you should have an account on codeplex, or github, or bitbucket where interviewers can go look at what you're working on and the stuff you're building. It completely cuts out the "coding" part of the interview and should simplify the whole process.
Your last paragraph here implies that a developers work is either A) able to be shared and not owned by their employer, or B) they spend their free time coding after doing it at work all day, instead of having other hobbies. If thats the bar an employer wants to set, thats perfectly reasonable. They shouldn't ever complain about not being able to find employees however, if they are going to artificially limit their prospective employee pool to people who have no interests outside of programming
1 - I've been active in sports my whole life. I work 40 hours a week, play in several competitive hockey leagues and still have time to tinker and build stuff in my own time. I'm also studying to get my commercial drone license, and have a host of other hobbies that keep me busy outside of coding.
2 - The only way I feel like a developer can possibly stay in tune with how fast our industry is changing is to code outside of where they currently work.
A good example is at my current gig we're building apps with AEM (Adobe Experience Manager), Java and AngularJS (1.4). If I wanted to go work in a smaller startup, do you think my knowledge of 1.4 is going to be helpful when most of my friends who are working at similar places have been developing with Angular2 for almost 6 months now? If I'm not working on my own to keep up, my skills will be completely obsolete when I want to get a new gig.
That's just a fact of life. I don't have any friends who simply show up, work 9-5, spit out some code and then go home and not do anything. Likewise, they don't go home, crack open Visual Studio and code until they pass out on the keyboard. It's pretty easy to do stuff in your off time and still have a social life.
I say this from the position of someone who has side projects on their own.
The general feeling that an engineer can't be any good without working unpaid outside of their job seems like a self inflicted and unnecessary cultural norm we've adopted as an industry. I can't think of any other industry where someone who goes home and doesn't practice their craft after hours is looked down upon as much as it is in software.
I don't have the label for it. It's similar to how employers want to hire developers for junior pay but don't want to provide any training and expect them to have taught themselves on various tools while lamenting the lack of skilled developers. Someone else in this thread mentioned the view of software engineers being viewed as artists who have to have a burning passion for their craft and I think that's bullshit.
Yea there are always guys who actually have that passion and enjoy programming as a hobby, but they are the minority like any other profession. It's become some sort of virtue signaling. I've talked to a number of devs who go through the effort of having publicly available work to show off who have confided to me that they do it just so that prospective employers feel that they are passionate
A business wants to hire you to solve business problems. Coding is the manifestation of the solutions. To me the white board session is to understand if you can take new problems and understand them enough to sketch out a solution. As a hiring manager, I'm glad you've written code before, I want to understand on a day to day basis if you can transform business problems into solutions.
At most of the companies I have worked for, the difficult part of my job is taking the pre-existing code that barely works under the old internal proprietary framework and rehabilitating it into the new internal proprietary framework with a bare minimum of new development.
Showing off that I know how to write (or recognize and copy) good code from scratch does not signal for that. I can't tell you how many times I have had to code something that is objectively incorrect because the old version did it that way, and the customer doesn't want the new version to be different.
The problem with the whiteboard interview is that you can't show an old, crufty code base on it, and ask the candidate to sketch out how to implement a simple feature request without overhauling the whole thing to use industry best practices. And you can't show an existing relational database schema that is pathetically ill-designed and ask about a new report for the customer. Those are the sorts of problems businesses have. They don't suck it up and pay the big bucks for a software pro until after the amateurs have already tried fixing it with an Excel spreadsheet or an Access database. And they don't want you to mess up the solution they already have, no matter how much baling wire and duct tape is holding it together.
Not everyone that can write code can also work well within an existing codebase. The only situation in the wild that I would trust to indicate that skill for my company is someone who actively contributes to an open-source project with a lot of other active contributors. A one-person side project that shows off everything you can do all by yourself won't reassure me. In fact, if it's too good, I might be worried that you will want to overhaul working code just because it's really, really ugly, and you can detect multiple code smells when you look at it.
>> To me the white board session is to understand if you can take new problems and understand them enough to sketch out a solution.
Honestly? This should be ferreted out in a screening interview.
As someone who's hired developers both as a manger and a senior dev, you know what's really important to me? Knowing where your head is at as a developer.
What I really want to know is:
1 - When shit hits the fan and you're buried under a mountain of stress, how are you going to handle that? Are you going to fight through it, or just give up?
2 - I want to know if you're open to other approaches to coding? What about other frameworks or tools? Do you believe there is one way to achieve a result, or multiple ways?
3 - Does your code have be perfect on the first try, or do you get something working first and then worry about how sweet the code looks later?
4 - How do you feel about fixing bugs? What if I made you fix bugs for 6 months before you started working on any project, how would you feel about that?
5 - Do you have the courage to stand up and say something if you feel like it will negatively impact a project you're working on?
Knowing how to solve basic coding problems at a whiteboard can't substitute for an impending deadline and tons of work that needs to get done in two days. I'd rather have an average developer who can handle a shit ton of stress and get his job done, then some rock star developer who folds like a lawn chair when things get tough. I want the developer who sees a tough deadline as a challenge, rather than the dev who whines constantly about it. You can't figure that out by standing at a whiteboard. You need to sit down and actually talk to the person to get to that stuff.
Here's the deal.
As a developer, I have about 30 repos out on GitHub with plenty of examples I've done in the last three years. If you want to interview me, then go look at my code first. I have a pretty specific style so all the code is consistent. Go look at my code, dissect it, ask me questions about it, ask me why did this instead of that, why I prefer some library over another one, etc. If you feel like my skill set is what you're looking for, then bring me in and then we can see if we're a good fit for each other. If you don't like what you see, then don't bring me in - it's really that easy.
Having one or two whiteboard examples will never, ever, show someone the depth of your skill set. You have to look at their code, which will give you insights a whiteboard interview never will. All the things you mentioned about "basic skills" are obvious when you look at someone's code. Did they use classic or prototypal inheritance? Did they know what closures are? Did they use a factory pattern? Are they using ES6 yet? What tools are they using for their projects? All this and a ton more simply from looking at their code.
And if you're a developer, you should have an account on codeplex, or github, or bitbucket where interviewers can go look at what you're working on and the stuff you're building. It completely cuts out the "coding" part of the interview and should simplify the whole process.