Bad workplaces are so common though that it’s a perfectly good heuristic to guess that if a place asks you to do whiteboard questions it’s a bad engineering workplace. You’re not missing much by passing, and the heuristic probably won’t be wrong much.

I guess you think every major tech company is a bad engineering workplace? Seems like a broad brush.

Is it even disputed anymore that the experience of working at the big tech companies is abjectly awful? I mean, you gotta work somewhere and they “are fine” and you might as well try to get paid well, but that’s a far cry from a workplace that stands out as good.

The only place I’ve worked that was “good” instead of “treats people poorly but where else are they going to go” was a small, boutique financial company.

Small companies that are randomly led by non-dummies are the best, but are exceedingly rare. Out of the vast majority comprising the other stuff, it’s mostly all so miserable that you’re doing yourself a favor to skip it unless the pay is some dramatic increase for you or you otherwise have some emergency requiring you to take some job.

Of course it’s disputed. There are lots of happy employees of tech giants. Any company with thousands and thousands of employees is going to have a wide variety of teams of varying qualities.

(And yeah, the pay makes a difference. Not a lot of places where you can make a few hundred thousand dollars a year.)

I work for a large tech company and don’t know of any company like that with a large number of employees happy with their company.

(I’m making a distinction between the idea that a job “is fine” where one “is happy” merely because the culture is at least not worse than elsewhere while the pay is better vs actually feeling positively about one’s company’s culture and corporate behavior.

For example, my friends who work at Facebook are “happy” with their jobs, mostly because of pay and because they know if they switch to other companies, politics, corporate misbehavior, etc., will just continue. But these same people tell me frequently how sad, upset, soulless, disappointed they regularly feel because of their employer.

That feeling I think is extremely widespread in tech, almost all employers. That’s the only part in my viewpoint that matters for whether someone “is happy” at their job, and it’s that type of bad culture I think can be easily flagged by little stuff, like bad whiteboard interviews.)

I blame the modern attempt to turn software developers into assembly-line workers. With sprints and tasks and momentum and a million tiny cuts that take the innovation out and replace it with anonymous criticism and process over product.

I largely agree. Modern companies are set up to cargo cult lots of process and pay lip-service to innovation while taking extremely risk-averse and conservative approaches to practically everything they do.

Nobody has any idea what’s going on; nobody has clarity. And when someone does have clarity, middle management is only interested if they can set it up like a battery to harvest credit from. If they can’t, their incentives are usually more aligned with intentionally abusing process to “manage out” innovative people.

seems true

I wouldn't go as far to say whiteboard interviews == bad company. I will evaluate the company if a whiteboard interview is run poorly however and consider it a bullet dodged.

going through / having just gone through this process this is where i've basically ended up as well... crappy interview experiences are universal enough that they don't disqualify a company automatically (though obviously i'm not terribly fond of them :-).

the one thing i'd add is that i do take particularly thoughtful / empathetic interview processes, interviewers who actually know and understand the question (rarer than you'd think), etc. as a fairly strong signal, as those sorts of things don't just happen by chance-- they are the byproduct of a culture of thoughtfulness (and thoughtful people tend to be thoughtful about most things).

I caught an interviewer red handed once by handing him the marker and asking him to show me. He tried and failed and then his coworker tried to fix his mistake and failed.

Ya I did not get that job lol.

Good for you for asking. As an interviewer myself I wouldn't dare ask a question I couldn't answer.

By the time we get to the whiteboard problem we've already assessed technical skills as well as we can. The whiteboard problem is to test their fit on the team. It has worked well for us and certainly weeded out some people who could have been problematic culturally. Is that a "failing?" Maybe we lost some more technically skilled individuals that way, but our team isn't exactly lacking because of it.