I've heard about the similarity between orchestral auditions and whiteboard interviews before. As someone who has prepared for whiteboarding interviews at a Big Five firm, I'm fascinated by the comparison. For a while I couldn't figure out how the similarity arose. Today it occurred to me that while in classical music the crisis was caused by the maxing out of demand, in software engineering perhaps it's the rapid growth in supply. By either mechanism you have a slots-to-candidates ratio crisis.