>You are then ushered into a room with the programmer's worst nightmare - a blank whiteboard.
Am I the only one who enjoys programming interviews? Even if you screw it up, it's still fun to try your hand at whatever problem they give you. They also don't expect you to do it perfectly; you're allowed to have sub-superhuman performance.
I interviewed at Microsoft and it was about 10 hours of this stuff and I loved it. Had a great time, and I think I did pretty well. One guy wanted me to write a shuffling program. So I came up with one which I later discovered was Fisher-Yates and optimal. But he kept saying "how can it be faster" so I'm not sure what I was missing. Most of the other stuff was pretty fun and straightforward - pointer stuff, string copying, synchronization. It felt like if you had gone through Sedgewick's algorithm book you'd be set for the most part.
Unfortunately by 7pm or so I was sorta exhausted (didn't sleep the night before 'cause I was so excited). I met the hiring manager, and he asked something fun like make a ring buffer and also write a non-recursive inorder traversal function of a binary tree. I apparently had some off-by-one bug in the ring buffer code, and then I just blanked out on the traversal question. No hire :\.
(OTOH, that team wasn't sure if they were going to be using VB6, or C++, or maybe .NET, but probably not because they wanted to ship with Office and Office severely limits dependencies. So maybe it was for the better.)
I believe that was the point - are you expected to do perfectly or not. There are different interviewers - some even just want to show off, probably like the string hashing one.
It's great if you can have a reasonable discussion that actually shows your knowledge.
I think the idea of solving a whiteboard problem can be fun, providing it's unique. Quite a few times while looking for an internship I was asked mostly standard problems out of "Cracking the Coding Interview" or similar. Under pressure, even problems I've practiced or just understood from a contextual standpoint can be tough. Personally I have issues with the usual situation of it - interviewer staring, which is intimidating, and/or not even trying to have a mutual conversation and bounce ideas around to ease some of the pressure.
Most posts complaining about interview process are being made by people who failed those interviews. There is a ton of reverse-survivorship bias here. It's certainly not the case that companies like GOOG/FB/MS are filled with all bozzos. If anything their interview process have been rather successful considering above average quality of talent at these companies and non-trivial products they work on.
I also sense lot of "entitlement" in OP's post and comments on this thread. It's like "oh I can't answer your interview questions but I'm so good that if I don't get the job, it would be only because your interview process sucks". Most company's HR would let you know what to expect at these interviews. If you are not comfortable with CS whiteboarding questions then you should just decline at that point. It's unprofessional to blame their process after you accepted to go through it, failed and then shit all over it because you didn't get the job.
This is not to say all interviewers are good and many could be downright assholes. But that feedback should be between you and their HR. It's just professional courtesy considering that these companies don't post on Internet how badly you performed on interviews compared to their other candidates to tell other side of your story.
Personally I like solving computational challenges whether I get job or not. As a programmers we are supposed to be loving these kind of CS puzzles. If nothing else, you walk out with few CS things you didn't knew before which would have taken same amount of time to learn anyway. I'm not saying interview questions shouldn't be job related but the fact is that many of these companies are doing LOTs of things and they need to hire more generally because they give you relatively more freedom to move around once you are in. So large companies have to keep things general at some level unlike startups with one project. In any case, if you complain about having to write code and design algorithms at developer interviews then you are probably applying for the wrong job.
Am I the only one who enjoys programming interviews? Even if you screw it up, it's still fun to try your hand at whatever problem they give you. They also don't expect you to do it perfectly; you're allowed to have sub-superhuman performance.