Every engineer on HN (several threads that I've browsed) seems to have a serious disdain for coder-pad interviews/whiteboard sessions. And I think HN has a good representation of software engineers. So, who are these companies hiring?
I think there's a serious disdain for interviewing in general. The whole process sucks from end to end. Often it's because the interviewers just aren't good at it. But when it comes down to whiteboard interviewing, I think it's about your value system.
More specifically, I think every interviewer has an opinion on the practical <--> theoretical spectrum, and the problem is when the candidate disagrees with the interviewer's opinion on where on the spectrum the interview should be.
The upside of a practical interview is that you are testing whether they can do the work. The downside of a practical interview is that it indexes heavily on experience and lightly on the ability to cross disciplines. Theoretical interviews are the reverse.
So the important question is: what does your team care about? Google will care much more about the ability for their engineers to move around than your startup will. In general large companies will care much more about portability. They have deeper pockets and are therefore more willing to train you on the job, so generally speaking if they think you can ramp up (even for senior hires), they're happy. As much as startups will say they see things this way, it's not really true. Startups in general care that their senior hires come with substantial domain expertise.
I'm not sure HN is representative of anything, especially if you only look at what's upvoted. If I had to guess, I'd say that this sentiment is posted by people with 10 years of experience who feel like they should be talking about something else during interviews, but that it's being upvoted by college students or recent grads (no matter what you're asked to learn, a large fraction of the group will be frustrated by it)
They are hiring a bunch of people who have a serious disdain for the way they are interviewed. A better question might be, "who are these companies putting in charge of their interview process?". I think the answer there is largely, "people who have a serious disdain for this kind of interview, but still need to interview people and don't have any better ideas for how to do it".
I would rather do an exam every year, and get a grade on the skills that they expect. Exams are standardized, granted that they are not perfect, but its closest to a system that works.
Am not at the whims and fancies of an individual interviewer.
I'm not sure what you mean by standardization. You're totally at the whim of the exam-maker either way. If anything I find algorithm screens tend to draw from a semi-standard set of fundamentals as outlined in books like Cracking the Coding Interview and tested on Leetcode among many other examples.
