> But in practice there are a zillion things you believe not because of logic, but because other people told you to. > Red lights mean stop The author ignores

> But in practice there are a zillion things you believe not because of logic, but because other people told you to. > Red lights mean stop The author ignores second-order effects. Red lights meaning stop is arbitrary, but I believe that I should stop at red lights not because I accept the arbitrary assignment, but because of the objective fact that if I don't I'll eventually end up in hospital. > The most successful companies all use whiteboard interviews The most successful companies all use bank accounts with million dollar balances. One shouldn't confuse cause and effect. I've worked for a few (arguably) successful companies, and I'm firmly of the opinion that they are almost invariably pathologically averse to risk and unwilling to experiment with new ways of doing things, especially when those ways aren't used by their competitors. Conversely, every such company seems to believe that their competitors are doing rigorous scientific analysis of business methods and so if their competitors are all using whiteboard interviews "there must be something in it". > The most successful companies all use whiteboard interviews Do Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Facebook owe their success to the quality of their developers, though? I would suggest that they do not. They may be relying on the wrong signals when hiring developers, not hiring the best, but still succeeding due to other factors. Heck, Google made a new programming language designed to make it hard to confuse mediocre programmers. That tells me something about the average skill of their developers. > The most successful companies all use whiteboard interviews The most successful companies also have lots and lots of applicants. Even if whiteboard interviews meant you automatically fail 50% of candidates because they're no good at them, that's not such a major problem if there are 100 candidates for each job. If ten of the candidates are top-class, you still have five of them left after half of them flunk the whiteboard. OTOH, if you have 10 candidates, the likelihood increases that the actually superior candidate will be the one that flunks.