Nice post.

The full-time position interviews are pretty much identical — unless you’re applying for a senior-staff/principal position — in which case I’d imagine that they go a little differently.

I spend a few hours every week conducting technical interviews. There is so much about the process that is ridiculous.

The biggest one, and one that you’ve mocked in this post (deservingly), is that we still ask algorithmy-whiteboard questions that have no practical application in what you’re going to be doing as a software engineer. Unless you’ve got years of specialization in a field that merits that kind of mathematical rigor and are applying for a position in that field, then the question is a really poor indicator of how strong of an engineer you are. I’ve seen too many new hires who can’t write readable and maintainable code, but I have to work with them because they were able to write a function that finds the minimum number of palindromes in a string in O(n²) time.