I&#x27;ve had conversations with various people about startups to &quot;solve hiring&quot;. Thing is, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s solvable any more than another engineer&#x27;s trap: fixing online dating.<p>People are involved and whether or not someone will work out is no more deterministic than figuring out if two people dating would result in a long term relationship.<p>The biggest problem with coding whiteboard problems is engineers fall into the trap of thinking the problem needs to be hard, which actually reduces the value of the test.<p>A coding test is simply to weed out idiots. That&#x27;s why FizzBuzz is a simple problem. It&#x27;s a negative filter. Acing such an easy test doesn&#x27;t mean you&#x27;ll be an awesome engineer but failing an easy problem almost certainly means you won&#x27;t be an awesome engineer. Substitute with a hard problem and a pass signal doesn&#x27;t get much better but a fail signal gets far noisier and you&#x27;re going to get an awful lot more false negatives.