For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies
<i>So, how did you get to where you are today?</i><p><i>I’ve always been passionate about coding, starting from my early days at Olympiad teams in high school and ACM teams in college.</i><p>Anyone who&#x27;s made it onto an Olympiad team[1] of any significant geographical scale, in any category, shouldn&#x27;t have to deal with this whiteboard nonsense.  Maybe a few lightweight-to-medium rounds to verify that they are what they say they are.  But that&#x27;s about it.<p>[1] We don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;s the case with Alibek; the article didn&#x27;t drill down into that aspect of his background.  I&#x27;m just talking to the fact that generally, there are plenty of easy ways -- albeit somewhat subjective, and in any case not uniformly applicable to all candidates -- to be at least 87% sure that the candidate isn&#x27;t a a self-deluded poser, or outright liar about their coding skills (which seems to be the default stance many interview teams take).<p>And the due diligence one should do to remove that 13% of uncertainty can be made far less time-consuming and grueling than it generally is.  Really, if you know how to read the signals, you can much more -- and much more easily, for all concerned -- about someone&#x27;s coding skills by giving them a single medium-hard, but short-and-sweet exercise... than rounds and rounds (and more rounds) of progressively harder ones, as seems to be the current craze.<p>EDIT: Overall this is a very heartwarming piece; if a company like Booking -- known for having had several exceptionally talented programers on its staff over the years -- can not only take on someone like Alibek, but apparently consider him to be something of a find -- then that&#x27;s a pretty damning indictment of the filtering processes used by the 38 of 39 companies that rejected him.