I've had conversations with various people about startups to "solve hiring". Thing is, I don't think it's solvable any more than another engineer's trap: fixing

I've had conversations with various people about startups to "solve hiring". Thing is, I don't think it's solvable any more than another engineer's trap: fixing online dating. People are involved and whether or not someone will work out is no more deterministic than figuring out if two people dating would result in a long term relationship. The biggest problem with coding whiteboard problems is engineers fall into the trap of thinking the problem needs to be hard, which actually reduces the value of the test. A coding test is simply to weed out idiots. That's why FizzBuzz is a simple problem. It's a negative filter. Acing such an easy test doesn't mean you'll be an awesome engineer but failing an easy problem almost certainly means you won't be an awesome engineer. Substitute with a hard problem and a pass signal doesn't get much better but a fail signal gets far noisier and you're going to get an awful lot more false negatives.