Looking at the Interview Process. (Reading02-lgrazios)

Getting involved in job searches is a part of the college experience, because people usually go to college to be able to get a good job and start a career. I have been trying to get internships for the past couple summers and I really haven’t gotten far in the interview process. The farthest I got was with a company that wasn’t primarily a tech company, so the process with that was very dissimilar to the usual process described in some of the readings and that most of my classmates have gone through. Most of the interview processes I have gone through involve a programming question online, and I haven’t gotten past that. For the company where I got far in the process, I didn’t do any programming I had a phone interview and then an first round interview, I think it was a “behavioral” interview, so I have never really experienced the “whiteboard interview”, that’s described by Sahat Yalkabov, as “humiliating and dehumanizing”. After reading his article, I can see what he means by the process being humiliating and dehumanizing, it probably feels humiliating since you have someone judging your work on a whiteboard, and it might feel dehumanizing in the manner in which candidates are informed that they didn’t get the part. But in a way I feel like he is looking at it incorrectly, I don’t believe candidates being judged in their programming ability on whiteboard, as humiliating it is just a really easy way to check for knowledge and competency in the subject. Yes, it might be a little out dated; these kinds of tests for knowledge could actually be done on a computer or on real programming environment. He also mentioned how the questions usually ask candidates to program algorithms from memory, and I would agree that that isn’t the best way to test a programmer, maybe the best way would be to give us actual problems that can be solved. Maybe a problem were the interviewer can actually see the thought process of the candidate and his/hers problem solving skills, which in my opinion is more useful than knowing algorithms by memory. I don’t think the process is dehumanizing, if you think about it in a certain way considering all the companies I apply to, it isn’t hard to picture all the people how apply to a certain company. They don’t really have the time and resource to respond to each applicant with personalized rejections, so I don’t really think of it as an attempt of the companies to be rude or “dehumanizing” it just isn’t possible. Considering this, I also believe that even if they can and don’t really want to send a nice and detailed rejection to their candidates, there is nothing we can do about it, we are applying to a job with them, practically by doing that we are giving the “power”, and they can create their own process, they could do it randomly or any way they seem fit. So in a way it doesn’t matter if we don’t like it, if we really want to work there we have to adapt to whatever process they have. I don’t really know if there are any laws that force a certain process or requirements for companies looking to hire, other than equal opportunity and stuff like that, from what I can tell whiteboard interviews are ok so it shouldn’t matter. And from an ethical point of view it doesn’t seem unethical, it makes sense a company wants to hire capable and well prepared people, so if they need a tough selection process to do so, I don’t see what’s wrong with it.