I really liked the cartoon. Clever, and insightful - we go through very difficult and interesting problems that are often unrelated to the job. I disagree a b

I really liked the cartoon. Clever, and insightful - we go through very difficult and interesting problems that are often unrelated to the job. I disagree a bit with the center pane, though (with the dog typing loops and the caption "I have no idea what I'm doing"). It is, in my opinion, very impressive to be able to find the largest sum of all square matrices in an NxN matrix at a whiteboard in 45 minutes. It's impressive enough (especially not knowing the exact question in advance) to be a positive indicator of the ability to do what is in pane 3, especially considering how many variables and logical basket weaving is often involved in moving some text a few pixels to the right. As long as you are willing to tolerate a very high false negative rate, this could be a good way to go. Unfortunately, it does mean that most developers looking for jobs will need to intensely study data structures and algorithms, and walk around with them loaded in "exam ready" memory" in a way that few people would need to simply to do their jobs. Personally, I'd say most people would retain this mental state anywhere from 1-3 weeks after a college algorithms course, provided they were a good student who understood the material. And it also means that lots of developers who could absolutely do this if they were willing to drop everything to study 50 or so hours and train at a white board will not be hired because they were more interested in just doing their jobs (which, ironically, is what they'd be doing at the new job). So we are going through a very inefficient re-taking of exams every time we interview. So I'm not surprised that some people have decided to stop interviewing, or just give up on finding a job that requires this sort of interview. It's up to a company to decide if they want to give up on hiring these developers, or to tolerate this kind of false negative rate. However I have close to zero interest in hearing about how hard it is to hire good developers if this is their approach, since it suggests to me that the aren't going to make any effort to find a way to avoid these false negatives.