Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
I&#x27;m getting a bit frustrated with the talk about interviews, as we repeat the basic message every now and then, but nothing changes. I feel we all agree that the current status quo is not good, but so far there has not been any good alternative:<p>- Whiteboards are unnatural. Besides, you don&#x27;t want to check their knowledge of university-grade algorithms or data structures.<p>- Problems to take home are an artificial setting - you can&#x27;t be absolutely sure that they did the work themselves, and you have no idea how the mesh with other people. And you probably get some false negatives because they&#x27;re stuck and can&#x27;t ask their colleague.<p>- On the other hand, if you&#x27;re using real code from your project, you&#x27;re just asking for unpaid work. And paying every candidate is a significant expense.<p>- Using a proxy measure like HackerRank or a Github portfolio excludes people from minorities or who only want a job and not a mission.<p>- Not doing any coding opens you up for people who can talk, but not code.<p>Have I missed anything? Is there a good alternative to find the right people? I&#x27;d love to improve my company&#x27;s interviewing process, but sooner or later we always hit one of the mentioned problems.