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Programmers Are Confessing Their Coding Sins To Protest a Broken Job Interview Process (theoutline.com)
A number of programmers have taken it to Twitter to bring it to everyone's, but particularly recruiter's, attention about the grueling interview process in their field that relies heavily on technical questions. David Heinemeier Hansson, a well-known programmer and the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails coding framework, started it when he tweeted, "Hello, my name is David. I would fail to write bubble sort on a whiteboard. I look code up on the internet all the time. I don't do riddles." Another coder added, "Hello, my name is Tim. I'm a lead at Google with over 30 years coding experience and I need to look up how to get length of a python string." Another coder chimed in, "Hello my name is Mike, I'm a GDE and lead at NY Times, I don't know what np complete means. Should I?" A feature story on The Outline adds: This interview style, widely used by major tech companies including Google and Amazon, typically pits candidates against a whiteboard without access to reference material -- a scenario working programmers say is demoralizing and an unrealistic test of actual ability. People spend weeks preparing for this process, afraid that the interviewer will quiz them on the one obscure algorithm they haven't studied. "A cottage industry has emerged that reminds us uncomfortably of SAT prep," Karla Monterroso, VP of programs for Code2040, an organization for black and Latino techies, wrote in a critique of the whiteboard interview. [...] This means companies tend to favor recent computer science grads from top-tier schools who have had time to cram; in other words, it doesn't help diversify the field with women, older people, and people of color.
If you're an expert pianist, you ought to be able to reproduce a simple tune on the piano, by ear and blindfolded. If you're an expert skier, you can ski backward and ski on one ski. If you're an expert chess player, you should be able to memorize any chess board at a glance. If you're an expert mathematician, you should be able to do simple integrals without reference tables. Those are not skills that you need, they are skills experts simply can't avoid acquiring as part of working in a field for many years.
Likewise, if you're an expert programmer, you should be able to write bubble sort on the whiteboard without a web search. If you're an expert Python programmer, you should have worked enough with strings so that you don't need to look up trivial functions anymore. Those skills are indicators of your experience, not specific job requirements.
(Personally, I wouldn't ask a candidate about bubble sort because that's so trivial as to be insulting.)