[quote name='confoosious']But there's no other way to do it. You can't sit someone down and say "do this task" to judge them. I realize the legends of google asking engineers to write code on a whiteboard but for the most part, professional jobs just don't work that way.[/QUOTE]
Surely you don't think those are 'legends'? And it's not just google; giving programming interview problems/questions and offering the candidates the opportunity to work it out/write it in code on a whiteboard has been pretty standard in the tech industry for decades, at least at any reputable company. Gives the interviewer(s) the opportunity to see if the candidate can demonstrate problem solving, creative thinking, and whether they actually have any sort of technical ability.
Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, they all do various forms of it for any programmer/software engineer new hires (and even for insiders), with multiple rounds of interviews.
My favorite is to have various interviewers ask candidates
the boggle question, even though it's an oldie now. That's at the actual in person interview, once they've passed a couple of rounds of phone interviews (after screening their resumes). We offer the candidate the opportunity to work out the problem(s) on the whiteboard.
Lots of other great questions we use, like
Monopoly and
others. With even a bit of skill and intelligence, these should be easy for qualified candidates to demonstrate a solution to (or at the very least, a decent attempt at a solution), even easier if they properly plan ahead and research. And yet, there are still deer in the headlight train wrecks.
BTW I agree with you on just about everything thus far in the thread, confoosius. You and some others have provided some excellent advice for those out there. Interviews are simply a critical tool in a company's arsenal for helping to determine the best possible candidate - consider them one of the most critical filters a company employs, and as confoosius said, properly handling onesself in an interview is a critical skill for a job seeker to acquire/employ. Good luck to all!