> If you are a good developer who sucks at whiteboard interviews, write open source code that everybody can see.
Not good enough for me. My engineers need to be able to collaborate with customers, management, and each other. They need to come up with ideas and explain them, advocate for their ideas. They need to be able to think, code, and collaborate.
Writing code is the easiest part of software engineering. In the environment I work, our engineers can't sit in isolation and submit pull requests. So while open source contributions are nice, being able to interview successfully is still required.
I completely agree that this is sometimes the case.
The hardest project I've worked on so far was a CubeSat project where I had to collaborate with Electrical/Computer and Mechanical engineers with specialized knowledge (orbital mechanics, the design of the custom boards, etc.) to develop the software. I had to communicate why certain hardware elements are absolutely needed in their design, why certain elements of the Attitude Determination and Control System need to be optimized, and so on. As well as why we needed many of software engineerings best practices, which when you step back and look at them from the outside some do seem fairly odd.
But on the other hand, it is not always needed. Also, I'm confident I could prove my capability without a whiteboard because I could probably talk about the problems and collaboration to resolve them on that project for well over 30 minutes.
Not good enough for me. My engineers need to be able to collaborate with customers, management, and each other. They need to come up with ideas and explain them, advocate for their ideas. They need to be able to think, code, and collaborate.
Writing code is the easiest part of software engineering. In the environment I work, our engineers can't sit in isolation and submit pull requests. So while open source contributions are nice, being able to interview successfully is still required.